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A lot of the computers with built-in BASIC were using some variant of Microsoft's BASIC (including the one that IBM used in PCs), so yeah they were big in that sense. For context: Altair BASIC was in 1975, MS-DOS was in 1981.

DavidCooper wrote:You have to remember how much luck is involved in it. If Gary Kildall hadn't put the phone down on IBM and virtually told them to **** off because he was busy

Bill Gates was then contacted by IBM, and although he didn't have an operating system to offer them, he had an idea about where he could buy one.

I wasn't there personally but afaik it went down a little differently. IBM first went to Microsoft thinking they also could license them CP/M because they had a certain CP/M product. But they couldn't and pointed them towards Digital Research.

Gary was away on business and didn't know what was going on. IBM, like it was, wouldn't tell what it was about without them signing a strict contract. His wife, with they're own laywers present, didn't want to sign without knowing what it was about. So eventually IBM left.

They returned to Microsoft and Bill Gates took the chance he was given. Buying what was basicly a trown together CP/M clone for x86 and making it work for IBM. Even basic things like directories were added in later dos versions. A.f.a.i.k. in reality it wasn't as dramatic like Gary giving them the finger and Bill being a bad guy.

Just my 5 cents.

In the end that was still about luck, but yeah.

Nitpick:

Nutterts wrote:Even basic things like directories were added in later dos versions.

Early DOS had the root directory (and the DIR command existed accordingly), what it lacked was subdirectories. For the record, many early machines lacked subdirectories, they only started being seen as a necessity once we got larger drives (your average floppy of the time simply couldn't hold enough data to make hierarchies worth it)

Anyway, enough off-topic :v

Nutterts wrote:Gary was away on business and didn't know what was going on. IBM, like it was, wouldn't tell what it was about without them signing a strict contract. His wife, with they're own laywers present, didn't want to sign without knowing what it was about. So eventually IBM left.

And he couldn't be contacted? For how long was he out of contact? Surely he can't have been unavailable for weeks, so why did IBM give up waiting when he was clearly their best option?

A.f.a.i.k. in reality it wasn't as dramatic like Gary giving them the finger and Bill being a bad guy.

And nothing I said suggested that Bill was a bad guy - he played a great game, grabbed an opportunity when it presented itself and took a bigger slice of the pie for himself than anyone could have expected.

DavidCooper wrote:

Nutterts wrote:Gary was away on business and didn't know what was going on. IBM, like it was, wouldn't tell what it was about without them signing a strict contract. His wife, with they're own laywers present, didn't want to sign without knowing what it was about. So eventually IBM left.

And he couldn't be contacted? For how long was he out of contact? Surely he can't have been unavailable for weeks, so why did IBM give up waiting when he was clearly their best option?

A.f.a.i.k. in reality it wasn't as dramatic like Gary giving them the finger and Bill being a bad guy.

And nothing I said suggested that Bill was a bad guy - he played a great game, grabbed an opportunity when it presented itself and took a bigger slice of the pie for himself than anyone could have expected.

Well, it was before email and cell phones you know

I should have looked into this properly before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

IBM, presided by John R. Opel, approached Digital Research in 1980, at Bill Gates' suggestion,[6] to negotiate the purchase of a forthcoming version of CP/M called CP/M-86 for the IBM PC. Gary had left negotiations to his wife, Dorothy, as he usually did, while he and colleague Tom Rolander used Gary's private airplane to deliver software to manufacturer Bill Godbout.[1][7] Before the IBM representatives would explain the purpose of their visit, they insisted that Dorothy sign a non-disclosure agreement. On the advice of DRI attorney Gerry Davis, Dorothy refused to sign the agreement without Gary's approval. Gary returned in the afternoon and tried to move the discussion with IBM forward, but accounts disagree on whether he signed the non-disclosure agreement, as well as if he ever met with the IBM representatives.

So he actually returned in the afternoon and may have negotiated with them.

Various reasons have been given for the two companies failing to reach an agreement. DRI, which had only a few products, might have been unwilling to sell its main product to IBM for a one-time payment rather than its usual royalty-based plan.[9] Dorothy might have believed that the company could not deliver CP/M-86 on IBM's proposed schedule, as the company was busy developing an implementation of the PL/I programming language for Data General.[10] Or, the IBM representatives might have been annoyed that DRI had spent hours on what they considered a routine formality.[7] According to Kildall, the IBM representatives took the same flight to Florida that night that he and Dorothy took for their vacation, and they negotiated further on the flight, reaching a handshake agreement. IBM lead negotiator Jack Sams insisted that he never met Gary, and one IBM colleague has confirmed that Sams said so at the time. He accepted that someone else in his group might have been on the same flight, but noted that he flew back to Seattle to talk with Microsoft again.[7]

With no clear, reliable account of events, we'll likely never know why it went wrong, but this was all part of the luck that led to Microsoft dominating. I didn't know that IBM tried to let Kildall back in soon after (neither OS was bundled with the machines, so the buyer could choose), but that MS-DOS had taken such a lead in a short time that there was no way to catch up.

Thing is... CP/M was multi-plateform and IBM liked to be unique and distinct. With CP/M the 5150 would just have been another CP/M running machine in the business world, while going with MS-Dos, they were imposing their own plateform as a competitor to CP/M and one that will eventually win the war in that market.

On that first quote (emphasis mine):

IBM, presided by John R. Opel, approached Digital Research in 1980, at Bill Gates' suggestion,[6]

That makes it sound like Bill Gates had been relevant since the beginning.

Sik wrote:On that first quote (emphasis mine):

IBM, presided by John R. Opel, approached Digital Research in 1980, at Bill Gates' suggestion,[6]

That makes it sound like Bill Gates had been relevant since the beginning.

It isn't about him being relevant. If you ask someone in the street if they've heard of Gary kildall, most of them would say "who?", but almost eveyone's heard of Bill Gates. Do you suppose that would be the case if IBM had gone with Kildall instead and if Gates didn't buy QDOS from Paterson? Maybe he'd have made some other major breakthrough, but it's more likely that he would have made insufficient impact to be widely known other than by geeks. Luck is a key component of this business, as is getting in first with something, and Gates benefited enormously from IBM's mistakes. (But while luck has a large role, there is much greater need now to provide quality if a new OS is to have any chance of making an impact, and that's why Brendan is absolutely right to throw out all the old crud and do the whole thing properly.)

DavidCooper wrote:It isn't about him being relevant. If you ask someone in the street if they've heard of Gary kildall, most of them would say "who?", but almost eveyone's heard of Bill Gates. Do you suppose that would be the case if IBM had gone with Kildall instead and if Gates didn't buy QDOS from Paterson? Maybe he'd have made some other major breakthrough, but it's more likely that he would have made insufficient impact to be widely known other than by geeks. Luck is a key component of this business, as is getting in first with something, and Gates benefited enormously from IBM's mistakes. (But while luck has a large role, there is much greater need now to provide quality if a new OS is to have any chance of making an impact, and that's why Brendan is absolutely right to throw out all the old crud and do the whole thing properly.)

I disagree to that. Luck plays a big role today too, and so does determination and positioning oneself in the right roles with the right contacts. You cannot expect to create a new, successful OS today in your garage. You need to work at the proper place, have the right contacts, and then persuade people that it is a good idea to do a new OS. You also need it to fill some function. All of this was part of Bill Gates success. Microsoft already had products (Basic), they happened to stumble on a new niche where they could introduce a new OS.

Also, a new OS today that "throws out all the old crud" (IOW, something completely new with no backwards compatibility) will never succeed in the mainstream OS area. It might succeed as a niche product, but then you need contacts and people that want to use your product in that niche.

Well my point was that Bill Gates initially deferred the job to Gary Kildall (by telling IBM to look for him), i.e. he had passed on the opportunity at first and only took it later when the other candidate didn't get it. If he wanted he could have easily taken it right from the beginning.

Of course details are probably muddly...

Sik wrote:Well my point was that Bill Gates initially deferred the job to Gary Kildall (by telling IBM to look for him), i.e. he had passed on the opportunity at first and only took it later when the other candidate didn't get it. If he wanted he could have easily taken it right from the beginning.

I don't imagine that he hatched the plan until after he'd sent IBM to Kildall. When considering the luck involved, you also have to take into account that Gates knew about QDOS and IBM didn't - if they had, they could have done a deal with Paterson directly

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rdos wrote:Also, a new OS today that "throws out all the old crud" (IOW, something completely new with no backwards compatibility) will never succeed in the mainstream OS area. It might succeed as a niche product, but then you need contacts and people that want to use your product in that niche.

There is no need for backwards compatibility so long as people can transfer (or convert) all their files and use them with equivalent apps, while old crud can also be emulated for anyone who needs it if there are no equivalent apps. Also, if people find it hard to find their way through the new menu systems of equivalent apps, it won't matter because speech recognition will do the work instead, jumping straight to the option they want (and it will be able to teach them the new paths through menus if they need to work silently). In any case, good software should allow the user to design their own menu system for each app, for example, by allowing them to put all the options they use the most into a single menu and giving them the option of storing lists of settings that they like to use for different tasks (such as with Audacity where you currently have to remember a number of different things to adjust which involve hunting through lots of menus and remembering what to change settings to every time you switch the input from microphone socket to USB or to internal sound - it should be possible to do the whole lot just by clicking on user-programmable "Setup A", "Setup B" etc. options).

Some day we will reach a point where intelligent programs can take any app written for use on one kind of computer and rewrite it to run on radically different hardware so that all apps can be available on all platforms. The user will also have so much control over the way the OS presents itself that it will be possible to make it look and behave exactly like another operating system which that user may be happier with. This will completely eliminate the need for the OS to handle any of the old crud directly and free up the designer to write a more efficient OS, and for that reason, it's more important to concentrate on attempting to design something close to the perfect OS than to waste years of your life attempting to support old crud the wrong way.

Speech recognition in an office setting isn't ideal. And I don't see how it would work in a noisy manufacturing setting either. So unless your intended market is only the home user I don't see that as a viable solution.

AMenard wrote:Speech recognition in an office setting isn't ideal. And I don't see how it would work in a noisy manufacturing setting either. So unless your intended market is only the home user I don't see that as a viable solution.

I did cover that - you'd have to learn your way around the new program, but that would be made much easier if you can name the function you want to find and have the app show you the menu path that leads to it so that you can do it silently in future. I also said that the user should be able to redesign the menus to make them work the way he/she wants them to work if the app's written properly, so they can put all the functions they actually use exactly where they want them. Also, there may be copyright reasons for not copying the entire menu system of an old app written by another company, but there's nothing to stop a user rearranging the it to an identical structure if the app provides that flexibility (as it should) - no user should be forced to use a menu structure dictated by a programmer.

You can already do this in many apps by rearanging the icons and toolbar. System menu should be standardize else your worker will waste their time trying to get the ultimate configuration. UI design isn't something to be taken lightly. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE amoung other spend a vast amount of $$$ and ressources in studying human device interaction.