Comment by Stierlitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stierlitz | Hacker News Reader

“But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems”

This article must be coming from some parallel universe. As I recall how Micro-Soft got a contract from IBM to supply an OS for their low-spec personal computer. They didn't have one, so Micro-Soft bought-in 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, using the IBM money to pay for it up front. Rather than buy it outright, Microsoft persuaded IBM to license a copy of DOS for each IBM PC sold. Later on with ‘Columbia Data Products’, Compaq and other, figuring-out how to clone the PC without paying IBM, Microsoft was more than happy to license DOS to them.

“Columbia_Data_Products”

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

“Joint Development Agreement between International Business Machines Corporation and Microsoft Corporation”

“With respect to Phase I Output, to the extent such joint ownership is prevented by operation of law each party hereby grants to the other a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide and irrevocable license to use, execute, perform, reproduce, prepare or have prepared Derivative Works based upon display, and sell, lease or otherwize transfer of posession or ownership of copies of, the Phase I Output and/or any Derivative Works thereof.”

http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/0000...

The novelty was in selling individual licenses of operating systems rather than bundling them only with hardware. Computers has OSes, and of course they were bought and sold among companies, but they were included with computer purchases.

So while IBM licensed with Microsoft to provide the OS (and MS just bought DOS from someone else), Microsoft sold the same OS to lots of others as well. And even as retail for upgrades and changes that didn’t come from the hardware vendor.

This is the same universe we’re all in.

CP/M and UCSD-Pascal, two operating systems available for the IBM PC besides DOS, had already been sold to individual users for many years.

Microsoft itself launched Xenix a year before the PC (August 1980).

I think like pretty much all of Microsoft, they didn’t innovate by doing it first, they innovated by popularizing it.

I can’t find sales of CP/M and UCSD-Pascal, but I imagine they aren’t what Microsoft started generating from their OS.

A Byte magazine editorial praised the newly launched PC as being the "Rosetta Stone" of computing for offering such a choice in operating systems. In practice, with PC-DOS being 5 times cheaper than the other two it was a standard from the start.

I mostly used QNX with PCs myself until Linux came along. So though it took a long time, PCs did eventually run nearly all known OSes.

"History" is always horribly wrong as written, if you were there at the time, I suspect. Add OS/9 and Flex to the list. There were countless others.

That's OS-9, with a hyphen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

Not to be confused with the IBM family of OSes with a slash, notably OS/2 but also including OS/390 and OS/400.

Actually not DEC PDP's had multiple OS's and not all of them where bundled RT-11 vs RSX-11 or RSTS/E.

You brought the system that suited we (as a Lab) ran RT-11.

I think that refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists. If you could say microcomputers in the ‘70s had an OS, Basic was it.

Mirosoft was selling software (licenses) way before the IBM deal happened. That phrase is about BASIC.

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