Tim Paterson
Tim Paterson (born
1956) is an
American computer programmer, best known as the original author of the popular
MS-DOS operating system.
Educated at the
University of Washington, Paterson worked as a repair
technician for a computer store in
Seattle, Washington. After he graduated
magna cum laude in June
1978, he went to work for
Seattle Computer Products as a designer and engineer.
A month later, Intel released the
8086 CPU, and Paterson went to work designing an
S-100 8086 board, which went to market in November
1979. The only commercial software that existed for the board was a standalone version of
Microsoft BASIC, and without a true operating system, sales were slow. Paterson began work on
QDOS in April
1980 to fill that void. QDOS stands for Quick and Dirty Operating System. QDOS was approximately 4,000 lines of 8086 assembly code and highly compatible with the
APIs of the popular
CP/M operating system, and version 0.10 was complete by July 1980.
In December 1980
Microsoft bought a QDOS license. Paterson left SCP in April
1981 and worked for Microsoft from May 1981 to April
1982. After a brief second stint with SCP, Paterson started his own company,
Falcon Technology, which was bought by Microsoft in
1986. Paterson did a second stint with Microsoft from 1986-
1988 and a third stint from
1990-
1998. During his third stint at Microsoft, he worked on
Visual Basic.
After leaving Microsoft a third time, Paterson founded another software development company, Paterson Technology, and also made several appearances on the
Comedy Central television program
Battlebots, where radio-controlled robots fight to the death. Paterson also races rally cars in the
SCCA Pro Rally series.
*
Paterson Technology website, a company founded by Tim Paterson
