As reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tim Paterson, who is acclaimed worldwide as the man who originally came up with the software behind MS-DOS, has filed suit against former newspaper editor Harold Evans, his collaborators Gail Buckland and David Lefer, and his publishers Little, Brown & Co and the Time Warner Book Group.
At issue is a chapter in Evans' recently published book "They Made America".
The book discusses great US inventors, and in one chapter credits the late Gary Kildall, the technical wizard behind former industry pioneer Digital Research Inc, with developing CP/M, an operating system of which, it says, Paterson's QDOS program was a "slapdash clone".
In the early 1980s Paterson sold QDOS to Microsoft, which was then a tiny software company. Microsoft improved the software, renamed it, and licensed it to IBM.
Paterson, who later went to work for Microsoft, has since retired. On Monday he filed suit in defence of his reputation.
"It's really a matter of the truth coming out and being widely understood, and if it takes a trial to do that, then maybe a trial can help, but it's not necessary," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Evans intends to vigorously defend the action, says the report.