Paul G. Allen wrote:
James E. Henderson wrote:
Even before DOS, Micro-Soft had a BASIC interpreter they developed
from a public domain research project into proprietary software using
"borrowed" time on a mainframe system. Their BASIC ran under the CP/M
operating system developed by Digital Research, a company Micro-Soft
soon destroyed.
The story goes that Bill Gates stole BASIC from someone in a
university he attended. So, apparently, M$ didn't event write any of
their versions of BASIC.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't attending the university. He had already
dropped out. He just stole their computer time.
Time on a computer used to be very expensive. The federal government had
developed the BASIC interpreter and had released it into the public
domain, so Gates wasn't stealing BASIC, he was stealing computer time by
claiming he was using it for something else. He converted the public
domain program into proprietary software using that Midas touch of his,
never revealing what changes he had made to cause his version not to be
in the public domain.
Wish I could find the link I once had showing the history of M$ products.
PGA
At the time IBM wanted to release their new PC, Gates, who had already
changed the company name from Micro-Soft to Microsoft, found an
operating system developed by a kid in Seattle (I think) that would do
much the same things as CP/M without some of its issues. He once more
made some changes to the program, named it DOS, and claimed it as his
own. The kid protested that DOS was supposed to be a joint development,
that he hadn't sold all rights to it but by that time Microsoft could
afford lots of lawyers and was able to litigate the kid into obscurity.
It was the DOS platform that showed Microsoft how profitable releasing
pointless new versions of their operating systems could be: each version
released was crippled in some way and Microsoft always announced that
they were developing a new version with super new features. Then Digital
Research, whose CP/M was being universally ignored by then, released
their DR-DOS that fulfilled many of the promises Microsoft had been
making. Each time Microsoft made a new release incorporating some of the
features they imitated from DR-DOS, Digital Research had something new
and better to hit them with.
Windows was originally developed by Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research
Center), who had no plans to release it, market it or even to claim
originating it. It was in the public domain, so both Apple and Microsoft
snapped it up and made their own proprietary versions of it. Even though
the Apple version was superior in many ways, it ran on a closed
architecture monochrome system; the open architecture PC was more
appealing although it took until version 3.0 for Windows to make it do
anything useful and it was always pretty much of a kludge.
James
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