Summary: Revisionism caught by critics who spotted a Microsoft mole
THE IEEE is giving many reasons for people to distrust it [1, 2, 3, 4]. It is a shame that even fine IEEE publications get polluted by corporate propaganda. A typical troll (who reports for a change) says: "The IEEE's Spectrum magazine has admitted that a recent contributor, who wrote an eyebrow-raising revisionist history of MS-DOS, is paid by Microsoft."
The IEEE added some face-saving dsclaimer only later. It says: "Upon publication, this article failed to properly disclose the connection between its author, Bob Zeidman, and Microsoft Corp., a key subject of the story. Mr. Zeidman is currently retained by Microsoft as an expert witness in Motorola Mobility v. Microsoft. IEEE Spectrum regrets the omission."
We have given examples of revisionism tactics, e.g.:
Enderle and the likes of him, who are paid by Microsoft, like to write inaccurately about the past, revising what actually happened. As Slated's Homer put it by reference to the lie: "In his 2005 book They Made America, former Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans gave the first comprehensive account of the saga in a profile of the late Kildall. He concluded that QDOS was a "rip off" of CP/M. QDOS author Tim Paterson sued for defamation and lost. Paterson has always denied using Digital Research's CP/M source code to create QDOS."
"And the author didn't just "forget" to mention he worked for Microsoft," notes Homer, "he deliberately tried to cover it up." To quote: "Getting an early copy of MS-DOS source code wasn't so easy; it isn't sitting around online, which is understandable because it's a commercial product from an ongoing company rather than open source or developed by a now defunct company. Because I collect vintage computers, I just happened to have one" (here is
the source).
“I hope Zeidman realises that astrotrufing is illegal”
--HomerHomer adds: "He also "forgot" to mention that the CP/M sources he used for comparison were largely incomplete."
To quote: "This site will be a clearing house for CP/M software. That's the good news. Now the bad news. What original source you will find on this site is all there is! The rest has been lost to the ages for one reason or another." (source)
Homer notes that "the fact that any comparison of these "sources" would've been hampered by the fact that they were actually in assembler code built for different architectures, and therefore present no means of making a direct comparison.
"Then he went on to perpetuate the lie about Gary Kildall committing suicide, when it's a fact recorded by the attending coroner that he actually died as the result of a "blunt force trauma to the head", resulting from an incident in a bar." (source: Wikipedia)
"I hope Zeidman realises that astrotrufing is illegal," Homer concludes. ⬆