Category: Stories
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MS-DOS paternity dispute goes to court
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Andrew Orlowski
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The parentage of the MS-DOS operating system is to be decided in court. Tim Paterson, who sold the Intel-compatible operating system 86-DOS (aka QDOS) to Microsoft in 1980 is suing author and former Times editor Harold Evans, and his publisher Time Warner, for defamation. Paterson’s work became Microsoft’s first operating system – it subsequently rebadged QDOS as…
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Space is the place, says Esther Dyson
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Andrew Orlowski
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Fly her to the moon. Please. In a remarkable case of life imitating satire, Esther Dyson has decided to host a space conference. No, we’re not making this up – and no, we can’t think of anyone more appropriate. “It’s not that there aren’t space conferences, but nothing as tacky and commercial as we want…
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Doonesbury savages Pepperland’s copyright utopians
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Andrew Orlowski
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As anyone involved with the original Apple Newton project knows only too well, when Garry Trudeau’s satirical eye engages a target, there’s only one winner. The Doonesbury cartoonist has a gift for holding up a mirror to bad ideas so they collapse under the weight of their own absurdities. This week[*] Trudeau has turned his attention to…
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Strength through pessimism! Keeping your stuff safe
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Andrew Orlowski
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“We have a lot of optimistic engineers – but not enough pessimistic engineers,” reckons David Rosenthal. In the 1980s, Rosenthal designed the NeWS windowing system with James Gosling. In the 1990s he was NVidia’s fourth employee, or really the first person the three co-founders hired. But for the past few years Rosenthal has been tackling…
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Nokia enters the data dispenser biz
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Andrew Orlowski
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Every bar has a condom dispenser. Why doesn’t every store have a data dispenser? Because you don’t want to shag a computer, of course. But this is an idea that remains largely unexplored. At 3GSM last week, Nokia tiptoed into a market that one day might be enormous: the “proximity server”. If you’ve attended a…
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Google to Wall St: our CFO couldn’t make it. So meet the Chef
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Andrew Orlowski
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The next time Google invites Wall Street analysts to a six hour financial presentation, it may as well direct them to a point in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. Microsoft already has a wonderful MapPoint “drowning service” that will show them precisely how to get there. That surely was the unspoken sentiment behind…