Re: The American Dream

Quirk wrote:

> It could easily have been Gary Kildall.

Not to mention Tim Paterson


~~== excerpt from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson ==~~

Tim Paterson (born 1956) is an American computer programmer, best known
as the original author of the popular MS-DOS operating system.

Educated at the University of Washington, Paterson worked as a repair
technician for a computer store in Seattle, Washington. After he
graduated Magna Cum Laude in June 1978, he went to work for Seattle
Computer Products as a designer and engineer.

A month later, Intel released the 8086 CPU, and Paterson went to work
designing an S-100 8086 board, which went to market in November 1979.
The only commercial software that existed for the board was a
standalone version of Microsoft BASIC, and without a true operating
system, sales were slow. Paterson began work on QDOS in April 1980 to
fill that void. QDOS stands for Quick and Dirty Operating System. QDOS
was approximately 4,000 lines of 8086 assembly code and highly
compatible with the APIs of the popular CP/M operating system, and
version 0.10 was complete by July 1980.

In December 1980 Microsoft bought a QDOS license. Paterson left SCP in
April 1981 and worked for Microsoft from May 1981 to April 1982. After
a brief second stint with SCP, Paterson started his own company, Falcon
Technology, which was bought by Microsoft in 1986. Paterson did a
second stint with Microsoft from 1986-1988 and a third stint from
1990-1998. During his third stint at Microsoft, he worked on Visual
Basic.

After leaving Microsoft a third time, Paterson founded another software
development company, Paterson Technology, and also made several
appearances on the Comedy Central television program Battlebots, where
radio-controlled robots fight to the death. Paterson also races rally
cars in the SCCA Pro Rally series.

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