BILL GATES DIM THE SUN SOFTWARE

When the IBM execs showed up, they were met by Kildall’s wife and business partner, Dorothy McEwen, who refused to sign IBM’s nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, a standard business document that would have kept the discussion secret and would have not allowed DRI to make use of confidential information presented by IBM. Rather than meet with the buttoned-down IBM executives, Kildall took off in his plane for a joyride. In one version, the IBM executives flew down to meet Kildall who, as a member of the personal computer counterculture, didn’t trust “Big Brother” IBM. Here’s where the story varies, depending on who’s telling it. (DRI) in Pacific Grove, Calif., because Kildall did have an operating system-CP/M. There, the young Gates told IBM that Microsoft didn’t have an operating system, but that the company should contact Kildall at his company, Digital Research Inc.

IBM’s first stop was then-small Microsoft in Bellevue, Wash., known for its version of the BASIC programming language.

BILL GATES DIM THE SUN SOFTWARE

The company decided that rather than developing software in-house, as was typical at IBM, it would instead partner with one of the small companies already producing code for microcomputers. IBM in 1980 started a skunkworks project in Boca Raton, Fla., to create the IBM PC. And I applied it to finally answer the question: Did Bill Gates steal the heart of DOS?īut first, here is the sequence of events, part known, part only speculated. My company’s CodeSuite forensic software lets us look inside operating systems and other software for fingerprints of other programs. But until now there’s been no way to conduct a reliable examination of the software itself, to look inside MS-DOS for the fingerprints of CP/M, and settle the issue once and for all. Kildall maintained that QDOS, and subsequently MS-DOS, had been directly copied from CP/M and thus infringed on his copyright. Microsoft has stated that its hands were clean. The big question: Was the operating system Gates sold to IBM his to sell? Or was a key part of it stolen from Kildall? A cloud of speculation has hung over that part of the story as well. We’ll get to that.īill Gates at Microsoft, however, did sell an operating system to IBM-and reaped then-unimaginable rewards. Why is a matter of speculation, mundane gossip, and urban legend.

Kildall could have virtually owned the personal computer operating system business, had he sold that system to IBM.

A pioneer in computer operating systems, Kildall wrote Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M), the operating system used on many of the early hobbyist personal computers, such as the MITS Altair 8800, the IMSAI 8080, and the Osborne 1, before IBM introduced its own machine, the PC. And John Atanasoff, who proudly showed his digital computer design to John Mauchly-who later codesigned the Eniac, often defined as the first electronic computer, without credit to Atanasoff.īut by far the most famous story of missed fame and fortune is that of Gary Kildall. Take that of Ronald Wayne, who cofounded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs but sold his shares for just US $2300. The history of the computer industry is filled with fascinating tales of riches that appear to practically fall from the sky.Īlong with stories of riches won, there are stories of opportunities missed. Zeidman is currently retained by Microsoft as an expert witness in Motorola Mobility v. Editor’s Note: Upon publication, this article failed to properly disclose the connection between its author, Bob Zeidman, and Microsoft Corp., a key subject of the story.

Bill gates dim the sun