Tim Paterson

Tim Paterson (1956) is a computer engineer who wrote the QDOS operating system.

History

IBM began developing a personal computer it would call the IBM PC in July 1980 and its first prototype codenamed Acorn began development in August. In 1981 IBM, after failing in negotiations with Digital Research for the development of the operating system (the reasons are discussed but include the Kildalls' delay in signing a confidentiality clause with IBM) agreed with Microsoft that they would provide an operating system for their computer..

Bill Gates' true success was getting the contract with IBM to allow him not only to sell the machine's own operating system, called PC-DOS, but also to be able to market the operating system for other systems.

Microsoft was running out of the stipulated delivery period and did not yet have the software, so Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided to buy the rights (first a partial license and later a full license) of the system created by Tim Paterson and they hired him (in May 1981) for its adaptation to the microprocessor used in the IBM-PC, the 8088 from Intel. The result was sold as PC-DOS to IBM and later marketed as MS-DOS to clone computers that would emerge after the success of IBM-PC.

Tim was employed by Microsoft at various periods in his life and worked on the development of Visual Basic. Some time later he also received some shares of it.

He currently owns a hardware company, Paterson Tech.

It is important to note that at the time of the creation of QDOS, Tim Paterson did not know that the main buyer was IBM, a large company that was creating its first 16-bit PC.