This commentary on MS-DOS 1.x was written by the operating system’s original author, Tim Paterson. His company Seattle Computer Products sold the source code to Microsoft for $50k in what is often regarded as one of Bill Gates’s greatest acquisitions. He had been approached by IBM to provide an OS for their upcoming Personal Computer but didn’t actually have a product. Of course he didn’t tell this to SCP when making the licensing deal. Microsoft’s contract specified a per-customer fee paid to SCP, but they really had only one customer in mind — the largest computer company in the world.

Although it seems to me that Microsoft already had enough talented engineers in 1981 that they probably could have written a CP/M clone from scratch? But maybe the timeline they promised IBM was too tight, in which case Paterson / SCP was indeed the perfect unwitting savior.

(When these events took place I was wearing diapers, so it’s all third-hand information. The great thing about HN is that there’s probably someone around who was in the room for half of it, and then somebody else who witnessed the other side.)