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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?
MSFT 483.03+0.5%Dec 5 9:30 AM EST
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To: ToySoldier who wrote (11670)10/22/1998 6:48:00 PM
From: John F. Dowd  Read Replies (2) of 74651
 
Toy: The real true story starts like this:
Then IBM went back to Microsoft and asked them if they could write an operating system like CP/M. Gates knew there was no time for that, but he also knew of a nearby company, Seattle Computer Products, that had written a CP/M-like operating system called 86-DOS, primarily to test the memory boards it was manufacturing and selling. Microsoft then bought 86-DOS and in April 1981 hired its author, Tim Paterson, to fix it up a little. They renamed it MS-DOS and delivered it to IBM on schedule. When the IBM PC was announced in August 1981, MS-DOS was there with it.

In the eyes of IBM and many others, MS-DOS's chief virtue was that it could run most of the software then running on the 8080 under CP/M (the 8088 was backward compatible with the 8080 source code and could run most of its programs with only small changes). If anyone had realised that within 10 years, this tiny system that was picked up almost by accident was going to be controlling 50 million computers, considerably more thought might have gone into it.

Once again Gates saw an opportunity and made the most of it. Up to that time he/MSFT was selling his version of BASIC.

JFD
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