We have seen elsewhere characters from the Khaavren romances through the eyes of other characters, notably Aerich who comes off far less sympathetically.
Dumas’ portayal of D’Artagnan – an historical figure who did in fact captain the Royal Musketeers under Louis XIV – was highly fictionalized to make a good story. Paarfi seems to be engaging in history not as a factual account of past events, but drawing a larger meaning applicable to the present, and bolstering his point with a selection of historic facts, filled in with whatever he likes. He probably really does think he is an historian, but Dumas certainly did not.

Pel as seen in this novel is not being portrayed as a hero. He’s not as all-perceptive as Paarfi has portrayed him, and his position as Prime Minister seems to have limited his avenues of information, to say nothing of action.

Take Paarfi with a pound of salt.

Ethelred: “No. That isn’t copyright. That is a PATENT or TRADEMARK.”

Ah, no. You can’t Patent an operating system. (The restrictions on what software can be patented is pretty severe.) You can’t Trademark an entire operating system, only some symbols that are used by an OS. The way an OS looks is solely covered by Copyright. Bill changed two things — the Drive letters, and “/” to “\” in the directory structure — to change the look and feel. Barely enough, but it was enough.

“Reverse engineering” cannot be done from a manual. Reverse engineering is the systematic analysis of a product to determine functionality. In the case of an OS, it would involve de-compiling it to reproduce the original code.

Using a manual as a guidebook for developing a product doesn’t really have an official term, but “cloning” would be as accurate as anything else.

How about Francis Drake? He scared the hell out of the Spaniards. Hated them.

Ethelred

Your stubborness on this won’t change reality. MS paid for it.

“He seems to have paid after the fact to make the bad press go away.”

No. MS was sued by Paterson’s employer. For one megabuck so they didn’t have much to sue MS over.

“The idea that Paterson cloned CP/M for sale is absurd. ”

I agree. He didn’t clone it. He reverse engineered the manual.

“At the time, those hobbyists shared everything they did, because there was no computer market to sell into.”

You have no idea what you are talking about. It was not some fantasy land. People that work many hours a week need some way to make a living. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs SOLD the Apple 1. Yes they shared a lot but the really major stuff was sold. On cassette tapes. Those were a pain.

“The Apple 2 didn’t even exist, yet. ”

Funny I was using one, well it wasn’t an Apple 2 it was an Apple ][+ the SECOND generation. My brother bought one in 1979. Again you don’t know what your talking about.

Ah I see you have figured you were wrong on that one. Problem is you have very little at all right.

“. Only mainframes, and that was Corporate ”

Get a clue. Bill and Paul wrote a BASIC for the Altair before the Apple 1 was made.

“Cloning, in this way, is a copyright violation… you do realize that, right?”

I realize that it wasn’t. He didn’t clone it. He used the manual and reverse engineered it. CP/M was a knock off of Unix.

“It’s called “Look and feel.” ”

No. That isn’t copyright. That is a PATENT or TRADEMARK.

“They’ve created a nice believable history for you… but it’s just not quite consistent with the realities of those years.”

I lived through it. It would take you just a few minutes of looking around with Google to see how much you had wrong besides the Apple and the Altair which was SOLD and ran MSs BASIC on it, oddly enough Bill and Paul got paid for it.

Do you really want to keep making silly errors when you can get it right with so little effort.

Ethelred

86-DOS (c) 1980, sold on 8″ floppy:
http://img.hrej.cz/b3/3e1f78b1.jpg

Apple II, II+, III models on sale in 1977, 1978, 1980:
http://www.vintage-computer.com/apple_ii.shtml

In particular, the “Apple 2 didn’t even exist yet” claim is falsifiable with a literal paper trail by checking the ads in OMNI and Scientific American for the appropriate years.

What? “The Toxic Avenger” totally had a political message…

+ FOX News

+ Every key figure at FOX News

+ AIPAC

+ Anti-Defamation League

+ MADD (Terrorizing young college kids into not drinking, what terrible people!)

+ U.S. Department of State

+ Senate Foreign Relations Committee

+ HUAC (I’ll bet you ten grand they’re still out there somewhere…watch out! And stay American!)

+ Isolationists (Complicit in ignoring terrorism = terrorist? Quite an irony to consider…)

+ Former President George W. Bush

+ Former President Andrew Jackson

+ Former President George Washington (Pretty awesome guy, considering he was a terrorist and revolutionary insurgent)

+ Give and take a little, the entire United States Federal Government

+ Well, expanding on that, virtually every federal government in the world, if we’re taking into account structural violence

+ Expanding upon that, every government that has ever ruled any large territory in world history

Yeah, that should cover it.

Let’s go ahead and add Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Hitler to that group. Throw Stalin in there too. And those ass holes who ran the Spanish-American colonies, and King Leopold II and the Belgian colonizers of the DR Congo.

I don’t like Mitt Romney. Let’s add him to the list and see if Bain Capital can buy off the FBI.

Hm. Let’s also throws Robespierre in there. Just for kicks.

That should be about it.

+ Glenn Beck.

Done.

Bill bought the right to use it *on the 8088 processor*. He paid $50,000 for that.

He then used it on the 80286 and 80386. There was a lawsuit over that. It was eventually settled by Microsoft buying the company that was suing them. (There are more facts there around which a conspiracy theory could easily be built. I’m not reporting them.)