Path: ccw.ch!elna.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!newsfeed2.uk.ibm.net!sackheads.org!ibm.net!news-lond.gip.net!news-peer.gip.net!news.gsl.net!gip.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news-backup-east.sprintlink.net!news-in-east.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!Sprint!204.156.128.20!news1.best.com!nntp2.ba.best.com!not-for-mail From: "Richard Fife" Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: From AFU: MSDOS 1.0 Easter Egg Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 18:52:47 -0800 Lines: 45 Message-ID: <6ff4b1$pvd$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> References: <6fc33c$rga@argentina.earthlink.net> <6fcevs$g6l$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> <6feoa6$7qa@fcnews.fc.hp.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: puertopollo.lucasarts.com X-Trace: 890967201 26605 firewall-user 206.86.0.12 X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.2106.4 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.2106.4 (The topic of discussion is whether an easter egg with a Digital Research Copyright Notice could (easily) have gotten from 8 Bit CP/M into MSDOS 1.0 had MSDOS used CP/M code). >: There's no way such an easter egg could get through that unnoticed. > >I'd like to challenge that assertion, but I have even less data to >support my challenge than Mr. Fife has to support his assertion. At the time that MS-DOS was created, there was no 16 bit version of CP/M. This so documented it isn't even funny*. It's why MS-DOS exists. Therefore any 16 bit operating system based on a previous 8 bit operating system would need to be rewritten to handle the 16 bit nature of the target machine. Admittedly, the 8086 is designed to make this easier through it's segmented architecture, but by no means is it a simple process. Some products at the time claimed to be able to automatically take 8 bit programs and translate them into 16 bit code, but they didn't work very well and by no means would be of use in a program as up close and personal to the computer as an operating system**. Therefore, in order for CP/M to be brought over to a 16 bit machine, the assembly code would have to be broken to bits, analyzed and put back together. Somebody doing this and not noticing that there was easter egg in there would be kind of like someone rebuilding a car engine and not noticing that one of the piston had been taken out and replaced with a stash of cocaine. Then again, maybe I'm overestimating the attentiveness of Bill and Co. -- Rich Fife -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------- * One source is "Gates" (a biography of Bill Gates) by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews (two Seattle Journalists). Available at your local bookstore or amazon.com. ** Source: Richard Fife (me) - Senior programmer, LucasArts. 15 Years experience in 8086 and Z80 assembly code (among other things). FYI - I have pulled apart MSDOS (Version 2.0) in my spare time and I own a copy of MSDOS 1.0, so I'll be sure to check any cites you give me (once I set up a machine capable of running it.) ###### Path: ccw.ch!elna.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news.belnet.be!news-penn.gip.net!news-peer.gip.net!news.gsl.net!gip.net!howland.erols.net!netnews.com!newsfeed.concentric.net!winternet.com!skypoint.com!not-for-mail From: "George R. Gonzalez" Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: From AFU: MSDOS 1.0 Easter Egg Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 10:52:29 -0600 Organization: SkyPoint Communications, Inc. Lines: 24 Message-ID: <6fglfm$lp8$1@shadow.skypoint.net> References: <6fc33c$rga@argentina.earthlink.net> <6fcevs$g6l$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> <6feoa6$7qa@fcnews.fc.hp.com> <6ff4b1$pvd$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: dial263.skypoint.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.71.1712.3 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.71.1712.3 Richard Fife wrote in message <6ff4b1$pvd$1@nntp2.ba.best.com>... >(The topic of discussion is whether an easter egg with a Digital Research >Copyright Notice could (easily) have gotten from 8 Bit CP/M into MSDOS 1.0 >had MSDOS used CP/M code). This legend may have come from another legend that says that if you disassemble parts of the MSDOS resident code, you'll see lots of the dumb code sequences that are just like those emitted by the Intel 8080 to 808x code converter. From that "fact", you can extrapolate that MSDOS was a stolen port of CP/M, or some other 8080 operating system. Very silly, but that legend has gone around.. Note to Microsoft Lawyers: I'm NOT repeating this as fact. ###### Path: ccw.ch!elna.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!feeder.news.azstarnet.com!reader1.news.azstarnet.com!news From: bill_h Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: From AFU: MSDOS 1.0 Easter Egg Date: Sat, 28 Mar 1998 11:07:44 -0800 Organization: Starnet Lines: 40 Message-ID: <351D4A80.7BE0@azstarnet.com> References: <6fc33c$rga@argentina.earthlink.net> <6fcevs$g6l$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> <6feoa6$7qa@fcnews.fc.hp.com> <6ff4b1$pvd$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 169.197.30.140 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Win16; I) Richard Fife wrote: > At the time that MS-DOS was created, there was no 16 bit version of CP/M. > This so documented it isn't even funny*. It's why MS-DOS exists. Well let's see......... IBM's Personal Computer DOS is DATED August, 1981. I'm not sure about MS-DOS, but I could look it up. "Paterson was introduced to the 8086 chip at a seminar held by Intel in June, 1978. He had attended the seminar at the suggestion of his employer, Rod Brock of Seattle Computer Products. The new chip sparked his interest because, as he recalls, "all its instructions worked on both 8 and 16 bits, and you didn't have to do everything through the accumu- lator. It was also real fast - it could do a 16-bit ADD in three clocks. "After the seminar, Paterson - again with Brock's support - began work with the 8086. He finished the design of his first 8086 CPU board in January, 1979 and by late spring had developed a working CPU, as well as an assembler and an 8086 monitor. In June, Paterson took his system to Microsoft to try it with Stand-alone BASIC, and soon after, Microsoft BASIC was running on Seattle Computer's new board. "During this period, Paterson received a call from Digital Research asking whether they could borrow the new board for developing CP/M-86. Though Seattle Computer did not have a board to loan, Paterson asked when CP/M-86 would be ready. Digital's representative said December, 1979..........." This is from page 12 of the paperback edition of "the MS-DOS Encyclopedia" What role did Paterson play in preventing DRI from getting CP/M-86 out sometime in 1979? When did Gates first meet Paterson? Would Gates have given the SOURCE for HIS basic to ANYONE without meeting him? When did Paterson have his hands on the SOURCE for CP/M-any_version? What was there preventing him from putting it through 'his' translator? I don't believe in Easter Bunnies, or any other fantasies. The truth is out there, waiting to be 'found'. Strangely, especially with lawsuits and Justice Department "investigators" all over the place, NO ONE seems to be asking the really tough questions. ###### Path: ccw.ch!elna.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!woodstock.news.demon.net!demon!news.demon.co.uk!demon!p850ug1.demon.co.uk!not-for-mail From: ard@p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: From AFU: MSDOS 1.0 Easter Egg Date: 28 Mar 1998 15:32:33 -0000 Organization: P850 User Group Message-ID: <6fj56h$hn@p850ug1.demon.co.uk> References: <6fc33c$rga@argentina.earthlink.net> <6fcevs$g6l$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> <6feoa6$7qa@fcnews.fc.hp.com> <6ff4b1$pvd$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: p850ug1.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: p850ug1.demon.co.uk [158.152.97.199] X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Lines: 65 Richard Fife (rfife@guma.ReverseTheGumaAndTakeOutThisPart.org) wrote: : (The topic of discussion is whether an easter egg with a Digital Research : Copyright Notice could (easily) have gotten from 8 Bit CP/M into MSDOS 1.0 : had MSDOS used CP/M code). I'm wondering if this is a corruption of another copyright message easter egg story - the one in Tandy's TRS-DOS for the model 1. To understand the background of this one, you have to know a little about the TRS-DOS filesystem on the model 1. a) Disk space is alocated in 'granules', a granule being 5 sectors or half a track b) Just about everything that's on the disk has an entry in the directory. In particular there's a file called DIR/SYS which is the actual directory track and BOOT/SYS which is the boot block c) Executable files were not just streams of bytes. They contained blocks, which could either be loadeable code (and the block header contained the address and length), or comments (block header contained the length), or... d) The ROM boot loader was dumb. It just read the first 256 bytes (1 sector) off the disk into RAM starting at 4200 (I think) and jumped to the first byte loaded. It did not regard BOOT/SYS as being an executable file as in (c) e) There were optional passwords on files. From this we deduce that BOOT/SYS was 5 sectors long, of which 4 were not used. In fact, the boot loader was written so that the first 2 bytes made the boot block look like a comment if you tried to execute BOOT/SYS. Now, in fact (and I've verified this) if you type BOOT/SYS.WHO (notice that password WHO...) at a TRS-DOS 2.3 prompt, hold down the right combination of keys (2,4,6?) and press return, it'll clear the screen, go into 32 column mode, and display a copyright notice. This copyright notice is not obviously stored in the remaining blocks of BOOT/SYS - from memory the bytes are XORed with the position in the message and with the keyboard data lines before being displayed. The above is all fact, and I've verifyied it myself. Now for the rumour, which I can't veryify. Note to lawyers - I'm passing this on as I heard it, and I'm not saying if it is true or not. One version of TRS-DOS wasn't written by Tandy, but by a 3rd party and licensed to Tandy. Tandy got fed up with paying the license fee and came out with a new version which they claimed was entirely re-written. Said 3rd party claimed that parts of it were taken from his code. Said 3rd party asked for a TRS-80 Model 1 and a new TRS-DOS disk to prove his case (I don't know if it ever went to court). He went through the above routine, and it displayed _his_ copyright notice. Tandy had copyied the boot granule and hadn't realised there was an easter egg in it. Later versions kept the easter egg, but with a Tandy message. : -- Rich Fife -- -tony ###### Path: ccw.ch!elna.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!202.14.100.1!status.gen.nz!kcbbs!riplin Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: From AFU: MSDOS 1.0 Easter Egg From: riplin@kcbbs.gen.nz (Richard Plinston) Date: 29 Mar 98 22:08:18 GMT Message-ID: <329887.79698.5196@kcbbs.gen.nz> References: <351D4A80.7BE0@azstarnet.com> Organization: Kappa Crucis Unix BBS, Auckland, New Zealand Lines: 19 > > At the time that MS-DOS was created, there was no 16 bit version of CP/M. > > This so documented it isn't even funny*. It's why MS-DOS exists. I have the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine. In it are several advertisements for CP/M-86 shipping with computers (and at least one for 86-DOS). In fact CP/M-86 had been shipping for some time. What wasn't shipping, and what you refer to, is the IBM-PC version of CP/M-86 which was delayed because DRI wouldn't agree to the NDAs and thus didn't get advance information. Also CP/M-86 was late, it was originally scheduled for late 1979 but didn't ship until Jan 1981 (ref Osborne-McGraw-Hill CP/M-86 users Guide).