Bill's mother also paid for the computer time at the high school Bill went to with his other friends who formed Microsoft with him. Since this was before the Microcomputer, time sharing on a minicomputer or mainframe was very expensive. So Bill and his friends had knowledge of programming a computer before anyone else did.
IBM claimed DRI charged too much for CP/M, and since Microsoft made BASIC IBM thought they could get a better deal on a DOS from Microsoft.
86-DOS became PC-DOS/MS-DOS and the DOS interrupts emulated the CP/M interrupts or API as it was later called. Back then, it was legal to reverse engineer stuff and make a copy of it using new source code. But the claim of Paterson and others was that they didn't pirate/steal CP/M they made an API in DOS that could run CP/M programs and then had a program that could convert a program to DOS from CP/M because the executable file format was different in DOS.
Microsoft did undercut CP/M in OS price, which was a big factor in getting paid by IBM and other OEMS for their DOS.
Microsoft Windows came out in 1985 and over the years it took more and more features from the Apple Macintosh. It did not have the source code of a Mac, but it was designed to use some of the look and feel from a Mac. Enough for trade dress lawsuits. Microsoft and Apple settled their differences out of court in the late 1990's.
CP/M was a good operating system, my father bought me and my siblings a Commodore 128 after the Commodore 64 died. By that time the Z80 coprocessor on the 128 ran CP/M80 for cheap, but it was too late, DOS had killed CP/M.
I remember there was a Laserdisk standard and they made Episode 4, 5, 6 for Laserdisk that was the original cinema version before Lucas changed things to make it more family friendly, like Greedo shot first instead of Han Solo, etc. The VHS version got edited and so did the DVD versions. Laserdisk was so old it had the original released to cinemas but not the edits because they abandoned the Laserdisk format for DVD and VideoCD later on.
I don't really know how to say this, but there is a survey option to this where they need all of that info for some statistical thing they are doing with this new web app.
I'm using a throwaway nick so my boss won't know I am asking here and using a friend's computer for the IP.
It is supposed to be used by a law firm and I have a boss that doesn't understand this stuff. We already had a few people quit over it and I was not told about it until I had signed the NDA and been there for a few weeks.
Boss refuses to answer by email, everything is him calling me in his office and yelling at me for not finding the list of things he wants in the program.
I'm deep in student debt and trying to find a way to earn money besides as a software consultant, etc.
Before this I worked fast food and other minimum wage jobs. I'm scared that I'll fail.
Damn, I'm new to this sort of stuff. I'm in a no-win situation if I can't make the list, and other is not allowed by my boss because he thinks there is a list out there with everything in it and says I am making excuses when I tell him I can solve it like you said with free input because then we'll get silly ones like Apache Helicopter, etc. So I'll get fired one way or the other.
I got a feeling I'm on a Snipe hunt or something?
I can't discuss it fully because of the NDA I signed.
I like it because you run your own nation and see if you can do better.