content: Learned more about Bill Gates recently. Any of you ever heard of a program called Stacker by Stac Electronics? Microshit stole the code for Stacker, renamed it, and included it as "DoubleSpace" in DOS 6.0. This was before my time, as we didn't have a PC until Win95 was out. A Los Angeles jury Wednesday ordered Microsoft Corp. to pay $120 million for infringing a software patent held by Stac Electronics Co., a much smaller software firm based in Carlsbad, Calif. I first heard about this incident from Jim Stone: Bill Gates has operated above the law since 1990. He destroyed stac electronics, destroyed WordPerfect and wiped out Lotus 1-2-3 by simply stealing their code and putting it straight into his operating systems and office products. I was one of the lucky few to get the VERY FIRST Microsoft dos 6.0 disks on DAY ONE, I installed it immediately and after watching their little "we are so proud of it" disc compression pitch, I typed dblspace at the command prompt AND FOR 1/4 SECOND, IMMEDIATELY AFTER HITTING ENTER IT SAID "STACKER, BY STAC ELECTRONICS". Microsoft immediately recalled the product, and released their patch the same week and the only difference was Stacker's install screen did not show up. Bill gates was so ridiculously arrogant he did not even make sure the stacker install confirmation was guaranteed to not show up when dblspace was typed. He destroyed companies by stealing their code outright and "let the lawyers sort it out" and he even lost a couple cases but by the time the cases made it through the courts, the target companies were destroyed. Here is another old article: Stac Electronics (the maker of Stacker) was one of the many fly-by-night-turned-big-time companies of the late 80’s, early 90’s. They took your precious hard drive and doubled or even tripled the amount of free space. It did this by compressing and decompressing programs on the fly. Kinda like zipping and unzipping files for you automatically. Why was this ever handy? Well, as hard as it is to believe, hard drives weren’t always 2 terabytes in size. They were actually pretty small. The first hard drives were 10 Meg (yes I said MEG!). This was roughly the amount of space that is on 7 of today’s floppies (sorry, I realize many of you have never used a floppy). You could store jack and crap on your hard drive. Therefore, automatic compression software was quite handy. Unfortunately, if your drive ever got corrupted, it destroyed exponential amounts of data due to the way the drive is compressed. Oh, well, details…details. Nevertheless, the was quite a market for this Stacker product. Then came Microsoft. They couldn’t be satisfied with having a monopoly on operating systems. They wanted what little market that Stacker had built up for themselves. Microsoft added data compression software to their MS-DOS 6.0 product. It gets worse; Microsoft bought the rights for the software from some little no-name company. Even worse than that, the company that Microsoft bought it from (I think the company name was Warez Bros. Inc.) reverse-engineered the Stacker compression algorithm. OOOOOOOOOPS. Then came the lawsuit. Stac Electronics (the makers of Stacker) filed a lawsuit again Microsoft for $120 million. Duh. Claiming that the “DoubleSpace” compression software inside MS-DOS 6.0 was a patent infringement. Duh. Then, Microsoft counter sued Stac Electronics. Huh? Yes, that’s right, Microsoft counter sued stating that Stac Electronics “misappropriated a pre-loading trade secret” revealed to them by Microsoft.   What this means is that Stac learned of an undocumented DOS call revealed to them by Microsoft and used it.  That’s so dumb, why should Microsoft be able to put undocumented calls in their OS, calls that WOULD BE USEFUL, and then sue anyone who used it?  If you’ve ever read the book Undocumented DOS you’ll know why this kind of crap royally hacks me off.  Microsoft won the countersuit, which was in the neighborhood of $13 million. This was absolutely ludicrous. How could Microsoft successfully counter sue? So what if they reverse engineered DOS. They were just trying to figure out how to get their crap to work with Microsoft’s crap. Microsoft’s product actually FREAKIN’ STOLE PROGRAM CODE FROM STACKER!!!! Microsoft should have had no legal basis for this countersuit. And shame on whoever the heck let Microsoft win this one. Well, when all of the smoke finally cleared, Stacker discontinued production. Disk compression finally became passe. Microsoft is still in business. Stac is not.  However, to the credit of the owners of Stac Electronics, they made an unprecedented display of compassion when they went out of business.  They sold their assets to a company called Alutris and returned all available cash back to the stockholders.  How many public companies have ever done that? Really makes you think how powerful Bill Gates has become and what he has done in the past to get there...