Recently I released the the first part of my adventure trying to find the ownership and and source code to Digital Research’s Concurrent DOS (also known as Multiuser DOS, with a separate spinoff product called REAL/32).
If you want to know what the hell Concurrent DOS is or my previous bits in the story, please read the previous post, as I will not be summarizing it at all here.
I’m stuck waiting for “Bill” to send me a drive still, and it will likely be several weeks before he gets around to this. While I do believe he will actually send it, and I don’t think it’s a scam, I think it would be silly to put all my eggs into one basket and trust a random stranger. My mom did always told me to not trust strangers, after all. I guess she also told me not to talk to them, but it’s too late for that now.
Datapac Australasia
You might remember from the last post that one of the companies that made a version of Concurrent DOS was Datapac Australasia. Since they were acquired by Citrix, I went down a rabbit hole trying to get ahold of their legal department only to hit dead ends.
On a lark, and just to cover loose ends, I found the LinkedIn profile for the founder of Datapac Australasia, and decided to annoy him with a message asking him about what he knew about this.
Hi!
I have been trying to find who owns the rights to Concurrent DOS now. Doing a bit of sleuthing, it looks like Datapac had, at least at one point, been maintaining and updating Concurrent/Multiuser DOS.
I was wondering if you had any insight as to who owns the rights to it now. I would like to purchase the rights to the source code that I can FOSS it for preservation purposes.
If you have any insight into this I would love to hear it, and regardless I hope you have a great rest of your day.
I assumed that he probably gets a million messages since he appears to have a long and fruitful career, but surprisingly after about a week I got this response:
Hi Thomas, You are right Datapac did have a licence to Concurrent DOS but it is no longer trading we sold it to Citrix. The original code was acquired from Digital Research by Novell. You would have to see if you can track down where all the Novell IP landed. Good luck with the search and please let me know if you ever do get to the source code. Cheers!
Damn.
I mean, it was a very polite and nice reply, and of course it was nice of him to respond at all, but I think with this Datapac Australasia is a thoroughly dead end.
Concurrent Controls
Concurrent Controls was another company that licensed Concurrent DOS, but they appear to have been dissolved quite awhile ago.
Still, as far as I am aware, no one died or anything, so again I found the LinkedIn for the founder, and sent them a message:
So I have been going down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to find out the history and current ownership of Concurrent/Multiuser DOS; the current rights holders to Concurrent DOS seem to be nebulous and it has been a heck of a ride to find.
I was curious if you had any insight to who might own the rights to the Concurrent Controls distribution of Concurrent DOS? If not the rights, at least the source code?
Thus far I have not gotten any response, and I suspect that I won’t, but the leads must be exhausted.
Conclusion
Much shorter one today. I’ve been told that I should document my progress with this journey. I figure having smaller, incremental updates could be valuable.
I have a few more ideas on where to look next. It looks like the 286 version of Concurrent DOS had a life of its own in the form of “FlexOS”, and that is going to be the next thing I pursue while waiting for the drive with REAL/32.