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Comment by peter_d_sherman | Hacker News Reader

>"IBM wished to purchase CP/M outright, whereas DRI sought a per-copy royalty payment in order to protect its existing base of business. The meeting ended in an impasse over financial terms, but Gary believed they had essentially agreed to do business.

Kildall tried to renew the negotiations a couple of weeks later. IBM did not respond because, in the meantime, Bill Gates purchased an OS from Seattle Computer Products that was written to emulate the look and feel of CP/M. He then sold a one-time, non-exclusive license to IBM, which used the designation PC DOS. With great foresight, he retained the right to license the product to others as MS-DOS."

[...]

>"IBM announced the PC on August 12, 1981, but with the PC-DOS list price set at $40 versus $240 for CP/M, most customers simply chose the former as the lower-cost option."

And the rest... is computer history...

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft)

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> that was written to emulate the look and feel of CP/M.

And that’s how DOS and then Windows ended up with “/” as the command-line option indicator and therefore “\” as the directory separator.

False. Not true, never was.

Here's the real story:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac...

CP/M didn't have directories until 3.0, which was released in 1983. DOS didn't have them until 2.0.

The backslash was chosen because the forward slash was used for arguments. This convention was taken from other timesharing operating systems of the day.

This is not true.

[1] CP/M 3 (normally called "CP/M Plus") does not have or support subdirectories, only user areas, just the same as earlier versions... (Such as B4:MYFILE.TXT or A0:WORDSTAR.COM.) Source: me -- I own 2 CP/M 3 computers. Feel free to check the manual:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/digitalResearch/cpm_plus/CPM-Pl...

[2] CP/M does not have standard command line switches or arguments, so there is no standard delimiter.

I used to believe that too, but https://lobste.rs/s/rar1ec/rust_security_advisory_for_standa...

I looked at some CP/M manuals from around 1980 and the commands mostly did not have options. The closest was PIP which put options inside [ ] and there was no / nor \ to be seen.

> IBM did not respond because, in the meantime, Bill Gates purchased an OS from Seattle Computer Products that was written to emulate the look and feel of CP/M. He then sold a one-time, non-exclusive license to IBM...

Yeah. It's incredible how IBM handed the golden keys to the castle on a plate cut in a solid 100000000 carat diamond to Microsoft.

This has to be the absolute worst business deal ever made in history: 3 trillion market cap for Microsoft. And IBM created that.

The story was not so linear, though. These new 16 bit machines (8080 & 8086) were useless without an OS. They needed it badly and fast.

86-DOS/PC-DOS/MS-DOS was born as a kind of throw-away OS to fill this hole temporarily. Microsoft was betting hard at the time on another OS called Xenix, which was Unix-based!

Then, somehow the industry decided that DOS was good enough, it lasted ~15+ years and this made Microsoft a fortune.

In the end, Bill Gates saw a business opportunity and acted quickly and ruthlessly. Gary Kindall, on the other hand, delayed the initial CP/M-86 development for too long.

By an irony of fate, Gary Kindall spent the rest of his career anticipating and innovating software concepts (Multiuser, Multitasking, Graphics Environment Manager, even the first encyclopedia on CD-ROM, ten years before MS Encarta) but somehow the timing was always wrong and all this never marked the return of the first CP/M glory days.

Gary Kindall was the greatest PC software pioneer, and as the old saying goes: “Pioneers take the arrows, settlers take the land”.

> They needed it badly and fast.

Lucky for them, Microsoft was happy to provide an OS badly and fast!

They got so good at it, they've been doing it ever since!

Being old enough to have used Xenix as my UNIX introduction, in hidsight there is a certain irony that Microsoft ended up getting rid of it, followed by not being so serious about UNIX subsystem on Windows NT.

AIUI the UNIX subsystem was there entirely for the purpose of getting Windows NT certified at C2-level security.

That is debatable. The PC clone business made the IBM PC the industry “standard”, since it opened up the supplier list to many companies. IBM alone (eg. PS2 and OS/2) as a sole manufacturer did not manage to conquer the world. And MS had the insight to offer DOS to everyone. MS really won because they were cheaper than alternatives (eg Berkeley GeOS, CP/M, Unix) until critical mass was established. Even if FreeBSD was available in mid 80’s, it would have become the “standard” today. Cheap and good enough always wins the day. Proprietary and expensive makes you 2nd best.

Berkeley Geos was killed off by Microsoft making licensing it by PC vendors untenable.

For other folks who remember it fondly, it's been opensourced:

https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

> Yeah. It's incredible how IBM handed the golden keys to the castle on a plate cut in a solid 100000000 carat diamond to Microsoft.

In all fairness, very few recognized at the time what that would lead to.

IBM had a deep, entrenched culture that had serious dominance over all computer business. There was not an article during that time that didn't characterize the business as "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs" where IBM was of course Snow White. Everyone else was essentially looking for crumbs. A similar example was illustrated in David Halberstam's The Dead Reckoning where General Motors was so dominant and culturally resistant to any new ideas from the outside that visitors from Japan were allowed to meet with the executives, but no discussions of the auto industry were allowed.

So in the eyes of the IBM leadership, this was a tiny, goofy idea that would not amount to much. One leader at IBM scoffed at the PC-DOS O/S calling it a toy.

Well, it was a toy that essentially ate your world.

Even without that, Bill Gates would have created something --- Microsoft did a _lot_ of custom development, e.g., the Tandy-Radio Shack Model 100 (which was the last bit of coding which B.G. did for production) and developed and licensed a lot of other products.

He also made his share of deals which took a lot of value away from other companies on his own:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

(buying MacBasic from Apple for $1 so as to kill it contine the MS-Basic license for the Apple II)

An interesting insight into this timeframe is Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp: A Silicon Valley Adventure_

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup

the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" thing shows up as documented by folks feeling its effects.

It's interesting that Gary was working for Intel when he created CP/M and Intel wasn't interested in it. Then IBM chose the Intel 8088 for their PC. Intel could have offered CP/M to IBM if they'd kept it.

I don't think anybody at IBM (or anywhere else) had an idea how successful the PC would eventually become, it needed many happy accidents for that to happen (and Microsoft was probably more responsible for that success than IBM, the other factor being cheap clones).

The original IBM PCs were thoroughly unimpressive, even when compared to much cheaper 8-bit home computers.

It was much more likely that the PC would have gone the way of the Dodo like most other computer architectures of that time.

I've heard 3 different versions of this story now. 1. Gary was out joyriding in his plane and when the reps from IBM showed up, his wife turned them down because she didn't feel like she had the authority to continue negotiating without him

2. IBM reps showed up, but it was Gary's wife's birthday, and so he told them he would need to reschedule

3. This version

I wonder if we will ever really know what took place that day.

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