History of the IBM PC, part two: The DOS empire strikes

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/ibm-pc-history-part-2/

by Tomte • 9 years ago

122 44 9 years ago

Razengan• 9 years ago

For anyone interested in the era of other “retro” computers and companies in the 1980s, Kim Justice’s documentaries on YouTube are pretty good.

StudyAnimal• 9 years ago

Kim Justice is good but game oriented. For people interested in the machines of the era including more business oriented machines, check out Tezza's channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/tezzaNZ

rb808• 9 years ago

I've always wondered why IBM chose Microsoft to create the OS - what someone told me just recently was that Bill's mother was [worked with the Chairman of] the IBM board which no doubt helped him get the contract.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates

edited: I've corrected this, she wasn't on the board but worked with Chairman.

pavlov• 9 years ago

Based on that Wikipedia article, she was not on IBM's board, but that of a non-profit named United Way which also included IBM's chairman on its executive committee.

Theodores• 9 years ago

Thank goodness for Wikipedia as this story is like the 640Kb quote that was only ever said because people say so, not because they actually heard it.

I was of the opinion that it was the IBM board, not some non profit, I am sure I would have noticed the difference. Somewhere out there is a well written version of the story with this detail wrong.

acomjean2• 9 years ago

According to the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" and part 1 of the article. MS was a programming language shop. Basically they wanted to get IBM an OS so it would be successful and they'd sell more software.

https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-par...

IBM didn't do their homework and went to microsoft for programming languages and and Operating System. Microsoft sent IBM to Gary Kildall's "Digital Research" company (they made CPM os). It was based in his house, he was away, his wife and lawyers wouldn't sign the NDA... They left empty handed, and Microsoft said they'd get them an OS.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

bitmapbrother• 9 years ago

Before the IBM representatives would explain the purpose of their visit, they insisted that Dorothy sign a non-disclosure agreement. On the advice of DRI attorney Gerry Davis, Dorothy refused to sign the agreement without Gary's approval. Gary returned in the afternoon and tried to move the discussion with IBM forward, but accounts disagree on whether he signed the non-disclosure agreement, as well as if he ever met with the IBM representatives.[8]

No one knows what really happened.

msla• 9 years ago

Just adding to the theme of "Bill Gates was a privileged, privileged man":

https://worldhistoryproject.org/1976/2/bill-gates-writes-ope...

Microsoft's software development [for Altair BASIC] was done on a DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer system. Paul Allen had developed a program that could completely simulate a new microprocessor system. This allowed them to write and debug software before the new computer hardware was complete. They were charged by the hour and by the amount of resources used (storage, printing, etc.) The 6800 BASIC was complete before the Altair 680B was finished.[21] This was the $40,000 of computer time [mentioned in the "Open Letter To Hobbyists"].

[snip]

The [PDP-10] computer system was funded by the Department of Defense through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The computer was delivered in the middle of the night in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War protests. Harvard officials were not pleased that Gates and Allen (who was not a student) had used the PDP-10 to develop a commercial product. They determined that this military computer was not covered by any Harvard policy. The PDP-10 was controlled by Professor Thomas Cheatham who felt that students could use the machine for personal use. Harvard placed restrictions on the computer's use and Gates had to use a commercial time share computer until MITS provided access to a PDP-10 in Albuquerque.

Was it wrong, legally or morally, to use a DoD-funded computer to develop a commercial product? Dunno, but the point is, Gates had access to it because he went to Harvard, and the software he developed on it got him into the position where IBM noticed him and his company.

mtl_usr• 9 years ago

I love the clash between lawyers and a CS professor at Harvard that was simply happy some of it's students were programming and working on some personal projects.

m_mueller• 9 years ago

Isn't this how things always go? Technology often trickles down from military until someone makes it accessible for others. In this case it was Apple, Microsoft and to some degree IBM. Bill Gates seems to be a master at grabbing the opportunities given to him. I don't see a fault in that, as opposed to later business practices.

covfefenut• 9 years ago

Bill's mother also paid for the computer time at the high school Bill went to with his other friends who formed Microsoft with him. Since this was before the Microcomputer, time sharing on a minicomputer or mainframe was very expensive. So Bill and his friends had knowledge of programming a computer before anyone else did.

IBM claimed DRI charged too much for CP/M, and since Microsoft made BASIC IBM thought they could get a better deal on a DOS from Microsoft.

86-DOS became PC-DOS/MS-DOS and the DOS interrupts emulated the CP/M interrupts or API as it was later called. Back then, it was legal to reverse engineer stuff and make a copy of it using new source code. But the claim of Paterson and others was that they didn't pirate/steal CP/M they made an API in DOS that could run CP/M programs and then had a program that could convert a program to DOS from CP/M because the executable file format was different in DOS.

Microsoft did undercut CP/M in OS price, which was a big factor in getting paid by IBM and other OEMS for their DOS.

Microsoft Windows came out in 1985 and over the years it took more and more features from the Apple Macintosh. It did not have the source code of a Mac, but it was designed to use some of the look and feel from a Mac. Enough for trade dress lawsuits. Microsoft and Apple settled their differences out of court in the late 1990's.

CP/M was a good operating system, my father bought me and my siblings a Commodore 128 after the Commodore 64 died. By that time the Z80 coprocessor on the 128 ran CP/M80 for cheap, but it was too late, DOS had killed CP/M.

wslh• 9 years ago

Bill Gates was born in a privileged family but this is not enough to sustain super challenges Microsoft dealt for decades. He outwork almost everyone. I am not saying he didn't use unfair tactics, just saying that he was not only lucky.

pstuart2• 9 years ago

success = luck + talent + effort

WalterBright8• 9 years ago

There was nothing Gates or Jobs did that I and many others I personally knew couldn't have done at the same time. We had the knowledge to do it. We were just unaware of the possibilities, and lacked the nerve. Opportunity stared us in the face and we were blind.

None of us were wealthy or privileged.

johansch2• 9 years ago

Related: I've been impressed by the quality of PCem recently:

https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

(Windows, Linux. Runs well on Mac via Wine.)

It emulates lots of specific pieces of historic PC hardware. Not cycle-accurate, but it's good enough to get roughly the correct speed for the CPU, graphics card you pick, etc.

johansch2• 9 years ago

As an example; it does a very neat impersonation of the Amstrad PC1512 (my first PC, back in 1989) including a faithful rendering of its unique 16 color CGA variation.

And unlike Dosbox, which doesn't try to run things at the proper speed, the right feeling is there...

gattilorenz• 9 years ago

There's also PCE (I hate these names, honestly): http://www.hampa.ch/pce/pce-ibmpc.html

It even offers a download with Microsoft Xenix 8086, and even one with PC/IX, which is actually the Unix you could get from IBM itself.

Now, if anyone can provide a disk image with UCSD Pascal (one of the operating systems originally available for the IBM PC), that'd be super cool.

scierama• 9 years ago

It's surreal reading the phrase, "History of the IBM PC".

digi_owl• 9 years ago

Well with the intro of UEFI, the last remanins of the original IBM PC, the BIOS, have been relegated to an emulated mode.

nsxwolf• 9 years ago

The motherboard form factors are still closely related. ATX is an extended version of the IBM AT standard.

WalterBright8• 9 years ago

Paterson freely admits that he pulled out his CP/M reference manual and duplicated each of its API calls one by one. On the other other hand, and while it may not have reflected much originality or creative thinking, what he did was pretty clearly legal even by the standards of today.

And CP/M itself's command line interface closely matched that of DEC's earlier minicomputer operating system.

walshemj• 9 years ago

That's what I thought as I worked on RT11 on PDP 11's when I saw a CP/M system I was struck by the similarity

rebootthesystem• 9 years ago

Ancient history few people know. AutoCAD started life as a CP/M application. When you bought ACAD you had to buy an 8087 math co-processor card as well as a 512K RAM drive card.

I ran ACAD for many years on such a system using a DEC VT-100 terminal, an early magnetic tablet with a wired puck having a coil for pickup and a large CRT-based graphics monitor. Memory restrictions were such that you had to do things like unload modules from memory before plotting and write clever code in Lisp to use less memory while drafting. Cool stuff.

sna1l• 9 years ago

I'm reading Andy Grove's book, "Only the Paranoid Survive" and he discusses the decline of IBM and rise of Intel.

Remains surprisingly relevant even though it was written over a decade ago, and an interesting view of PC history.

History of the IBM PC, part two: The DOS empire strikes

Related Stories