Its decision was based on two reasons. The first was that IBM feared their microcomputer might compete with their mini and mainframe businesses and wanted the less powerful chip to keep the PC in a different class. The second and probably more important reason was that a small industry of hardware and software products had already been developed for the Intel Many more supporting chips were available for the older chip, and this meant that a functioning system could be assembled within a shorter period.
One of the new suppliers that IBM contacted was Micro-soft. Initially, they approached them for software and a computer operating system. Bill Gates was surprised by the request for an operating system and quickly referred the IBM representatives to Gary Kildall and his operation called Intergalactic Digital Research.
When the IBM representatives arrived, they were disappointed with their reception. The story varies but apparently Dr. Kildall had plans to go flying his airplane during the morning hours and asked his wife Dorothy to meet with the visitors. August Calendar of Famous Inventions and Birthdays. The Most Important Inventions of the 21st Century. Top Inventions From the s Through the s. Comparing Popular Programming Languages. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for ThoughtCo.
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We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Microsoft then substantially rewrote the software to support subdirectories and hard disks; version 2. Microsoft retained the rights to the operating system and licensed it to other computer manufacturers, calling it MS-DOS. To access this material, you must agree to the terms of the license displayed here, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.
September update: Microsoft has just released the same code on GitHub. The announcement is here and the repository is here. Note the request to kindly not submit Pull Requests. It will not, of course, be an actively maintained project! But they were not able to agree on licensing terms, so IBM left and pursued other options. But the key provision in that agreement was the one that allowed Microsoft to license the operating system to other computer manufacturers besides IBM — a nonexclusive arrangement that IBM agreed to in part because it was caught up in decades of antitrust investigations and litigation.
Hundreds of thousands of IBM computers were sold with MS-DOS, but more than that, Microsoft became the maker of the crucial connection that was needed between the software and hardware used to operate computers.
The company known as Big Blue, which had once been the largest in America, and 3, times the size of Microsoft, lost control of the PC platform it had helped build as software became more important than hardware.
By the early s, the company was losing billions of dollars a year and struggling to stay afloat, with Microsoft surpassing IBM in market value in January IBM had also let its wild ducks be corralled by overly cautious lawyers — a lesson Microsoft would learn from, throwing legal caution to the wind at times. That would occasionally land the company in hot water, including with the famous antitrust suit brought by the U.
Justice Department in the late s. And so goes the history of modern computing — from hardware to software, from wild ducks to cowboys and misfits, transitions powered in large part by a single highly consequential contract provision.
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