Comment Re:There is a price for what you want (Score 1) 1643
Downgrade this for getting the facts wrong.
Microsoft BASIC was originaly written by Bill Gates. I know because I tried to optimize some of his code while I was there - a non-trivial task, as I discovered.
Yes, Microsoft bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson's Seattle Computer. But what is not so well known is that Tim Patterson himself worked on the PC-DOS 1.0 project.
Customers were not required to buy DOS for their IBM PC, at least not in the early days. The original IBM PC was sold with a choice of operating systems. CP-M/86, P-System, PC-DOS and I think one other.
PC-DOS (as it was then known) cost $50 dollars, the others cost around $400. Which one would you have bought? (Just to help you out, minimum wage back then was about $2.65/hr)
Microsoft is where it is because they got a number of things right about the software business: They were the low cost provider. They were the open supplier - MS products were the first which offered binary compatibility across hardware vendors. And they understood that volume is more important than margin.
A lot of things happened later: Microsoft became the IBM it was trying to dethrone. But that's another story...
Microsoft BASIC was originaly written by Bill Gates. I know because I tried to optimize some of his code while I was there - a non-trivial task, as I discovered.
Yes, Microsoft bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson's Seattle Computer. But what is not so well known is that Tim Patterson himself worked on the PC-DOS 1.0 project.
Customers were not required to buy DOS for their IBM PC, at least not in the early days. The original IBM PC was sold with a choice of operating systems. CP-M/86, P-System, PC-DOS and I think one other.
PC-DOS (as it was then known) cost $50 dollars, the others cost around $400. Which one would you have bought? (Just to help you out, minimum wage back then was about $2.65/hr)
Microsoft is where it is because they got a number of things right about the software business: They were the low cost provider. They were the open supplier - MS products were the first which offered binary compatibility across hardware vendors. And they understood that volume is more important than margin.
A lot of things happened later: Microsoft became the IBM it was trying to dethrone. But that's another story...
