One of our esteemed readers, who keeps us painfully accurate, has taken exception to our characterizing Digital Research Inc (DRI) as "Microsoft's very earliest competitor" last week in that story we wrote about how the Canopy Group had lost its appeal of the Microsoft/DRI settlement dispute to Novell.

"Good Lord, woman," he wrote, "have you forgotten that DRI was not Microsoft's "first competitor" but the source (literally) of MS-DOS? When Gary [Kildall, the creator of CP/M] demonstrated that they'd stolen his code, they paid him off, thus establishing what has become a long-standing tradition at Microsoft. Did you also know that they were too stupid, or arrogant, to excise the comments from the source code that [Dave] Cutler stole from DEC that eventually became NT? The truth is that the reason Microsoft's operating systems suck is that they've never actually written one, just endlessly patched stolen property."

For those of you too young to remember, as well as those of you who never knew, or are struggling with your own Ronald Reagan-like demons, we asked him to recount the yarn again. He writes:

"In the beginning was CP/M. CP/M begat QDOS and QDOS begat MS/DOS. In 1979 or thereabouts, IBM decided to build a PC using off-the-shelf components, and Intel sold them on the 8088. CP/M was the dominant OS for Intel processors, so IBM showed up in Monterey to talk to Gary Kildall about an OS, but got turned away by his wife, so they went to see the next most famous name in software at the time, namely Billy-boy. Billy, being a smart cookie (he and Jobs have a lot in common) said sure, we'll be happy to develop an OS for you, ported CP/M, and re-christened it MS/DOS. The rest, as they say, is history. When Gary kicked up a stink, they bought him off, he bought a plane and started drinking, and died of head injuries in 1994 after falling off a bar stool in his hometown of Monterey."

And there you have it, folks.