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Well, Gates bought it for $25,000 from a Seattle company called Seattle Computer Products (I think?). It was call QDOS (Quick and Dirty Op System) and was originally written for Intel for the 8080 family of processors. CP/M, on the other hand, was the brainchild of Gary Kildall, the head of Digital Research, around the mid-1970's.

I met Kildall in the early 80's and asked him about his FM Encoding system used in CP/M. I asked him what the title "FM" was all about. He smiled and said: "fuc#ing Magic". A few years later he developed double-density storage that used MFM Encoding. The next time I saw him I asked what the "MFM" was for. Bigger smile from Gary: "More Fuc#ing Magic".