The parents of Bill Gates lived in Westchester County, NY near IBM's headquarters in Armonk, and hob-nobbed with IBM big-wigs. Being a hardware company, most of IBM was clueless about software, thinking that it was incidental to making computers.
As the IBM PC neared announcement, the need for an operating system finally entered the skulls of the executives. Gates' mother picked up on this and connected them with her "computer genius" son, who was at university in Washington. He dropped out and bought QDOS from some hackers in Seattle, and turned around to sell it for a huge profit to IBM.
IBM didn't like the price. Not realizing the value of it, they convinced Gates to rent it to them! They also didn't like the name Quick & Dirty Operating System, and changed it to IBM Disk Operating System.
IBM DOS is what made it onto the first PCs, not Microsoft, which didn't exist in any substantial way, if at all, at the time. I was just starting at IBM then, so saw this from the inside. However, I may not have the rest of the details entirely correct.
My memory is that eventually, IBM woke up to their blunder concerning software. But by that time, Gates had his own MS version of DOS and was marketing it like the weasel that he is. In the end, IBM had to pre-load MS DOS instead of IBM DOS, because it is what the market wanted.
Afterward, the war moved onto the Graphical User Interface where once again, IBM deftly managed to go up in flames. MS initiated with Windows; IBM countered with OS/2. That is a whole other story...
The parents of Bill Gates lived in Westchester County, NY near IBM's headquarters in Armonk, and hob-nobbed with IBM big-wigs. Being a hardware company, most of IBM was clueless about software, thinking that it was incidental to making computers.
As the IBM PC neared announcement, the need for an operating system finally entered the skulls of the executives. Gates' mother picked up on this and connected them with her "computer genius" son, who was at university in Washington. He dropped out and bought QDOS from some hackers in Seattle, and turned around to sell it for a huge profit to IBM.
IBM didn't like the price. Not realizing the value of it, they convinced Gates to rent it to them! They also didn't like the name Quick & Dirty Operating System, and changed it to IBM Disk Operating System.
IBM DOS is what made it onto the first PCs, not Microsoft, which didn't exist in any substantial way, if at all, at the time. I was just starting at IBM then, so saw this from the inside. However, I may not have the rest of the details entirely correct.
My memory is that eventually, IBM woke up to their blunder concerning software. But by that time, Gates had his own MS version of DOS and was marketing it like the weasel that he is. In the end, IBM had to pre-load MS DOS instead of IBM DOS, because it is what the market wanted.
Afterward, the war moved onto the Graphical User Interface where once again, IBM deftly managed to go up in flames. MS initiated with Windows; IBM countered with OS/2. That is a whole other story...
Yes thats how I remember DOS & MS DOS roll out too.
I didn't know much more of that history tho... gates' mom got him the deal :).
Good info. Thank you for taking the time to write all that. :).
Armonk is pretty close to chappaqua, right?
Is that you Teddy?
Omg. I wasn't even thinking of Teddy. I was thinking of killary.
No, but apparently I was. Confused Chappaqua with Chappaquiddick.
And yes, Chappaqua is near Armonk.