The history of Microsoft operating systems

The story of the “PC” starts in 1980. IBM had just finished creating their “personal computer” or PC, a new generation computer was not a protected concept, explaining why this term is still used today.

With the computer created, there was still the difficult job of finding an operating system to run on it. It should actually be said that at this time there were a lot of computers on the market and that the word “standard” wasn’t an associated word.

So IBM naturally decided to knock on the door of the leader of these systems of the day, Digital research. This company sold their operating system with their CP/M computers.  Alas, for Digital research, Gary Kildall, the managing director, was not there at the time and so their lawyer looked after this situation, badly, forever putting their relationship with IBM in peril. The story of the information technology sector takes a turn in history.

IBM therefore decided to turn to a small company in Seattle, named Microsoft.  At this time Microsoft had not even built an operating system, with the company being known for its design of a programming language, “Basic” for Altair.

Bill gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft

Microsoft accepted the mission to sell to IBM an operating system. But there was one small problem, this system didn't yet exist! And Microsoft had nothing to offer! This is the first great bluff of Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft with Paul Allen. Microsoft decided to purchase the early stages of an operating system from another small company, Seattle Computer Products, from where the name of this new system originated, SCP-DOS. This system was actually a copy of the CP/M system from Digital Research – some even saying that whole parts of their system were integrated. In any case, the purchase of this system allowed Microsoft to complete the transaction.

Tim Patterson from Seattle Computer Products created this OS to be able to quickly adapt applications from the CP/M system to the latest offering of the moment, the x86 (a name that is still used today). The system was named Q-DOS, Q for Quick and Dirty OS (The operating system was quickly and badly put together, to put it politely).

The transaction was completed for an amount of 50 000 dollars. This system was quickly renamed to 86-DOS and later MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), a name that is surely still talked about even with users of today’s generation (its still possible to find a reduced copy of these famous commands in Windows XP).