Perhaps John Wharton’s ghost will visit Bill this Christmas

The history of computing and the path taken to get where we are today sports a multitude of skeletons and closets.  Some were aired, others continue to lurk, but some were dragged out so they could be immediately buried and forgotten and John Warton, who just passed away last week, was involved at the beginning of one of the latter. 

He was working at Intel when a young man by the name of Bill Gates, who represented a small company called MicroSoft approached the chip maker with an OS he had created, known as MS-DOS or QDOS or 86-DOS depending on who you ask.  Thus started a long chain of events which lead to where we are now; including legal battles on the origins of MS-DOS, thanks to some interesting resemblances to other programming languages being developed at the time. 

Drop by The Register for the Cole's Notes version, and consider following some of the links if this story is new to you.

"In the autumn of 1980, John had been at Intel to receive a visit from the 24-year-old CEO of a tiny software company called MicroSoft that specialised in programming languages. Wharton headed a technical team conducting an evaluation of the software Bill Gates brought with him to the meeting."

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