[ducttape45]

Wow, you hit upon one of the biggest secrets in IT history. I always heard, though, that Gates "appropriated" the DOS code from it's original inventor and then used licensing trickery to keep him down while he started making his millions selling MS-DOS.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[wildandcrazyrussian]

Right on all accounts. The other factor is that Bill Gates was from an extremely wealthy family and his mommy, Mrs. Gates, sat on the board of directors of IBM. So one day, after they discussed that they had this little hardware thing (the IBM XT) but weren’t particularly interested in software for it, she dropped a suggestion to have them buy her son’s — whereupon he went out and bought one from Seattle Computer to sell to IBM. I have heard this story many times.

[matt1234]

Wow, you hit upon one of the biggest secrets in IT history. I always heard, though, that Gates "appropriated" the DOS code from it's original inventor and then used licensing trickery to keep him down while he started making his millions selling MS-DOS. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In his book, Accidental Empires, Cringely asserts that Seattle Computer Products stole chunks of the DOS code from another company. Then MS bought DOS from Seattle Computer Products.

As far as "licensing trickery" is concerned, I don't know the legal details of the agreement(s).

One interesting fact is that IBM wanted to buy the software for its new PCs rather than develop it in-house. IBM wanted an OS and programming language. MS, when first approachd by IBM, had the programming language but not the OS. So, they went across town and bought DOS.