where is the original creator of DOS these days?

[pstokely]

the one who sold it to Bill Gates?

[7th_Sephiroth]

1. i heard

he hung himself and his ghost is fowling up all of microsoft's systems

[LastKnight]

2. that was steve jobs

the dude in charge of apple computers

-LK

[Syrinx]

4. nope

I'm not even sure that Jobs knows how to program. He was (and is, again) Apple's business guy. Wozniak was the technical visionary in Apple's early days. And I don't think either one of them had anything to do with DOS.

[Syrinx]

3. which guy

ms-dos was based on qdos, written by Tim Patterson. qdos, in turn, was based on cp/m written by Gary Kildall.

[Xithras]

5. He went to work for Microsoft

There's a bit of mythology and misunderstandings about the real origins of DOS.

The guy who really wrote QDOS, Tim Patterson, never actually owned it. He was an employee at Seattle Computers, a computer hardware company that built equipment for the CP/M market. The story is that they built some new piece of processing hardware for a new version of CP/M that was supposed to be released by Digital Equipment, and then that version of CP/M kept getting delayed. With no OS on the market capable of running the hardware, the management tapped one of their software developers to write an OS capable of running on the hardware to show it off. In an extremely short period of time, Tim Patterson rolled out QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System).

A short while later the CP/M version they'd been waiting on was released, and QDOS was nearly relegated to the dustbin. At that point some computer wannabe upstart walked in and negotiated a $10,000 distribution deal for QDOS in order to show it off to some prospective clients. When the clients (read: IBM) indicated that they were interested (and offered a huge sum for it), Gates bought it outright for $50,000. Seattle Computers, a hardware company, wasn't really interested in marketing the QDOS system anyway, and readily agreed to the terms.

Tim Patterson quit Seattle Software later that year, went to work for Microsoft, and made a bundle of money (no idea where he is today). Seattle Computers plodded on for years as a small scale computer hardware manufacturer, but eventually disappeared in the mid 80's, unable to compete with the upstart PC makers like Compaq and Packard Bell.