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To: Alomex who wrote (33566)	6/2/2002 5:33:47 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

"Indeeed, IBM wanted CP/M and BASIC on their new machine. MS produced the most popular BASIC at the time, and, as jonkai points out, IBM thought they wrote CP/M, or at least could license it to IBM. One trip to Seattle, solve two problems, or so the IBM executives thought. "As it turned out, MS did not manufacture nor could license CP/M and staggeringly, Kildall drop the ball with IBM. Gates saw the opportunity and jumped in. Luck favours the prepared mind, as they say. " But of course Microsoft _DID_ sell a CP/M product, one which IBM had seen. That product was the Z-80-based Softcard, a plug-in card for the Apple II which ran CP/M. I saw these on many Apple IIs in 1980. If you mean that MS was not the developer of CP/M, nor did it have the legal ability to license it to IBM, this is of course true. But the earlier poster said that IBM had seen CP/M in a Microsoft product, and this is almost certainly true. As I said, Softcards were pretty popular in 1980. Also, IBM visited DR _first_, before visiting MS, thus shooting down your theory that they were stupid and went to MS because they somehow thought MS was the place to get CP/M. (I base my points above on direct witnessing of the Softcard, on following Kildall's work since the times I used to see him in the halls of Intel in the mid-70s, my experiences at the Homebrew Computer Club 1976-79, and many Web sites detailing the chronologies. I did meet Kildall a few times, but never talked to him about this IBM issue, as I figured he would be fed up with hearing "So what _really_ happened!?") --Tim May