>DOS actually stood for the Disk Operating System
Actually, PC DOS was the name that Gates gave to the operating system that he bought for $50,000. The program he bought was named QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Although Quick and Dirty Operating System was a more apropriate name, Bill knew that he had to rename it before licencing it to IBM.
==================
IBM needed an operating system fast and Microsoft didn't have one. What they had was a stroke of luck - the ingredient everyone needs to be a billionaire. Unbelievably, the solution was just across town. Paul Allen, Gates's programming partner since high school, had found another operating system.
Paul Allen: There's a local company here in CL called CL Computer Products by a guy named Tim Patterson and he had done an operating system a very rudimentary operating system that was kind of like CPM.
Steve Ballmer: And we just told IBM look, we'll go and get this operating system from this small local company, we'll take care of it, we'll fix it up, and you can still do a PC.
Tim Patterson's operating system, which saved the deal with IBM, was, well, adapted from Gary Kildall's CPM.
Tim Patterson: So I took a CPM manual that I'd gotten from the Retail Computer Store five dollars in 1976 or something, and used that as the basis for what would be the application program interface, the API for my operating system. And so using these ideas that came from different places I started in April and it was about half time for four months before I had my first working version.
This is it, the operating system Tim Patterson wrote. He called it QDOS the quick and dirty operating system. Microsoft and IBM called it PC DOS 1.0 and under any name it looks an awful lot like CPM.
There was still one problem. Tim Patterson worked for Seattle Computer Products, or SCP. They still owned the rights to QDOS - rights that Microsoft had to have.
Vern Raburn Former Vice-President Microsoft: But then we went back and said to them look, you know, we want to buy this thing, and SCP was like most little companies, you know. They always needed cash and so that was when they went in to the negotiation.
Paul Allen: And so ended up working out a deal to buy the operating system from him for whatever usage we wanted for fifty thousand dollars. |
