Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.
The latter made sense, since taking and giving back to the community was a natural and fair system. Which served everyone, while obligating no one. And in any case, how would you charge for something with no physical form and that anyone can copy?
Imagine how different the world might be if gates’ mom didn’t work at ibm.
I met Bill Gates a couple of times at Microsoft. He wasn't an average man who got lucky. He was/is a hard-working, extraordinarily brilliant man who got lucky.
I know the playing field is not level. We don't all have an equal chance to be a billionaire. But I do know that most of us have not reached our full potential. Most of us could be better (on whatever dimension you desire) if only we tried harder.
Imagine how different the world might be if we did.
That’s not a maybe, he’s talked about it in interviews.
The 8086 was out there and selling for years. AT&T ported UNIX™ to it, meaning it was the first ever microprocessor to run Unix.
But even so, DR didn't offer an 8086 OS, although it was the dominant OS vendor and people were calling for it. CP/M-86 was horribly horribly late -- it shipped after the IBM PC, it shipped about 3-4 years after the chip it was intended for.
The thing is, that's common now, but late-1970s OSes were tiny simple things.
Basically the story is that there was already an industry-standard OS. Intel shipped a newer, better, more powerful successor chip, which could run the same assembly-language code although it wasn't binary compatible. And the OS vendor sat on its hands, promising the OS was coming.
IBM comes along, wanting to buy it or license it, but DR won't deal with them. It won't agree to IBM's harsh terms. It thinks it can play hardball with Big Blue. It can't.
After waiting for a couple of years a kid at a small company selling 8086 processor boards just writes a clone of it, the hard way, directly in assembler (while CP/M was written in PL/M), using the existing filesystem of MS Disk BASIC, and puts it out there. MS snaps up a licence and sells it on to IBM. This deal is a success so MS buys the product.
IBM ships its machine, with the MS OS on it. DR complains, gets added to the deal, and a year or so later it finally ships an 8086 version of its OS, which costs more and flops.
The deal was very hard on Gary Kildall who was a brilliant man, but while MS exhibited shark-like behaviour, it was a cut-throat market, and DR needed to respond faster.