Relevant snippet from an article I chanced across earlier today:


One thing about the original 68000 was that there was some design fault in the exception handling, which made virtual memory quite difficult to implement. One way was to have a pair of CPUs, another was to make a complex support chip. Apollo and Sun took those two different approaches.

One other minor factoid... IBM released the IBM Displaywriter in 1980 (~18 months before the IBM PC) and it was based on the Intel 8086... needless to say, IBM (at least OPD) was working with Intel before the PC, so there was a relationship and familiarity with programming of the 8086 within IBM. Also, IBM released their DisplayWrite word processing program on the PC after a while... as the code was already there and the only changes required were for PC-DOS mostly.

Another interesting bit of info... at one point, IBM released a unusual product for the PC, which was the PC/370 and later the PC-AT/370. This was a set of adapter cards that installed in the PC or PC-AT (16-bit bus version) and allowed the user to run IBM 370 mainframe code. The boards had a pair of Motorola 68000 chips that were re-microcoded to implement the 370 mainframe instructions. There were also some dedicated connections between the boards (top mounted connectors). We had a couple of of folks in our department that had the adapters and software installed. They provided level-2 support for these... pretty cool considering the timeframe, which was the mid-1980's.... mainframe VM running on a small box that sat on your desk!

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

The PC/370 was a remarkable thing!

Also remarkable, a little earlier than the PC, the IBM 5100. Portable computing! APL and Basic! Very much sold as a solution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m54rKlErwA


- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100

Ah, the 5100 (and 5110)... I was trained on those and a had few in my territory when I was in the field. In fact, I still have a display assembly from one sitting in my garage! As the display was quite small, there was a switch that allowed you to view the left or right side of the display versus the entire entire set of columns, You could also attach an external display as well.... while the internal display had separate connections for vertical, horizontal, data, etc., the external was NTSC on a BNC connector. Overall a pretty interesting machine from GSD (General Systems Division), as they also had the System/32, System/34, System/38 and later System/36 machines which ran RPG (multiple versions).

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

That's a nice solution for an 80 column display... I had a little Commodore scientific calculator which did the same - it showed 5+2 digits and then the next 5 digits when you pressed a button.

Regardless of how the ball started rolling, it wasn't fluke luck that turned Gates and Co. in to the powerhouse they became.

Digital Research was in a position far ahead of Microsoft, in the same market, and managed to drop the ball.

The home computer market was dominated by the consumer computers.

The business market had as much mini computer business as it did micro computer business. You might have a PC for Word processing, or in finance for some to do some spreadsheet modeling on, but the rank and file were using terminals hooked up to mini computers. PCs were expensive computers and weren't very good at "sharing" quite yet, as networking was just breaking loose in the market. And even then a PC with an ethernet card and cable is far more expensive than a terminal and RS-232.

Even after the IBM PC came out, the market was wide open for anyone to jump in and make a play, both in hardware and software. The computer world was very rich and diverse.

So, whatever luck or advantage may have got Microsofts foot in the door, it was hardly easy sailing for them to become what they have.

In some way, Microsoft's advantage with IBM was a bit like Acorn's advantage with the BBC. In both cases they saw the deal as being very important, and were as flexible and accommodating as they could be. And so Microsoft got the deal which Digital Research didn't, and Acorn got the deal which Sinclair didn't.

It's worth noting that Microsoft had already been around for a while and were very successful with their various interpreters. Which also meant they knew something about licensing, and royalties, and success at scale. They were very canny to acquire DOS outright but to sell only a non-exclusive license to IBM. In some ways, that was their innovative action.

In the end, it seems that Brock (SCP) and Kildall didn't totally loose. Sure, they never made Gates money (not many people have) but I don't think they suffered financially in the end.

Which reminds me of the time I first heard of Bitcoins. If I had bought a few hundred dollars worth (they were literally hundreds per dollar) my life would be radically different too.

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Cat; the other white meat.

Well, I'll still maintain my views on how MS became as big as they are... you also need to factor in IBM's viewpoint. Keep in mind that IBM was the "defacto computing company" on the planet... and as the old saying went, "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM". Based on that and some corporate arrogance, IBM's legal team had no problem giving MS and Gates the (software) clone business... after all, why would anyone choose a clone over an IBM computer?!! Yet more history lessons.... who knew.

PS - I would also note that with IBM paying Microsoft all those years on DOS license royalties and some OS/2 licensed subsystems, we (IBM) literally financed Microsoft's entire development of Windows and most of their other SW products! I doubt most people have any clue on just how much $$$ flowed from IBM to MS over those years, the term "staggering" comes to mind.

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

And I have no doubt that IBM was taking their cut off of each sale as well. IBM also made lots of money selling their hardware along with those DOS licenses.

MS made VAST amounts of money off their office products: Word, Multiplan, and, eventually, Excel.

Microsoft has always been an applications company. The OSes were certainly important, but moreso as a mechanism to host applications (THEIR applications), rather than simply just a boot loader. They were an applications company with an OS, not the other way around.

MS was always criticized about how their internal applications always were more tightly integrated in to Windows than their competitors. Applications drove OS features, applications using "secret" APIs, etc.

MS wanted you to buy Office, and their Dev tools that worked with Office. This is why they essentially "gave away" their entire software suite to the developers. ("Gave away" is in quotes as the MSDN wasn't particularly cheap, but certainly cheaper than buying individual licenses of everything.)

Even SQL Server had very tight integration in to the NT kernel (which is why I used to be able to routinely crash the server with an errant SQL statement back in the day).

The suggestion that Mommy and Daddy gave Bill the DOS contract and then he just sat on his laurels shoveling cash in to the vault is misleading.

The IBM/MS OS contract was a lucrative deal to be sure, but it was not guaranteed in any way to be as successful as it became, and there was a LOT of work involved to take MS from leveraging that opportunity to where it is today.

Ok, so it wan't bills daddy, it was Sams so my memory isn't all that great. And yes I skipped the section prior to that but basically the sale was tossed BG's way and he licensed it just the same way everyone else at IBM already was.

I'm not saying that MS would have made it big on their own, I'm saying that without IBM tossing that sale to Gates who then went to someone else Microsoft would never have existed, it was pure luck on the timing provided by IBM. It wasn't anything brilliant, wasn't any great marketing genius.

And yes the previous paragraph in that link backs up what I say, the OS war was already over, CP/M had won and even though the IBM PC didn't get CP/M the api calls in MSDOS were close enough and the architecture were close enough that porting CP/M software over was trivial. Many seem to think that IBM/Intel/microsoft won the OS war but what I'm saying is it was already won before that. Thats why Commodore didn't have a chance unless the Amiga could have ran CP/M software.

Speaking of MS, they have changed their tune a bit in the last few years. Their open source contributions are actually very good now. Granted, they have a long way to go but many of their products are open source. I'm curious as to what they are going to do with GitHub....hopefully they won't mess that up. But can you believe that SQL Server runs on Linux? Who would have thunk it!

And speaking of IBM...they now own RedHat. GitHub and RedHat were two companies that I really respected. I just hope their evil masters don't destroy them. And since I use Fedora at home....does that mean I went back to IBM with a 2018 "PCDOS"?? LOL

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Cat; the other white meat.

Well, after reading the stuff BigEd linked, saying the sale was "tossed BG's way" is pretty disingenuous.

Sams didn't have any pre-relationship with Gates. He met with MS, asked about their already (quite successful) operation, and then gave them the business. There weren't cronies, glad handing each other on the golf course. Gates and Co. earned their business in the same way Kildall didn't. As they say, 90% of success is just showing up.


You can't say that at all. Was the DOS deal a bounty for Microsoft? Heck yea. Would MS have folded up shop and gone the way of the wind if they DIDN'T get the DOS contract? Unlikely. If Kildall actually inked the deal, MS would have still got all of the language business. And there's nothing that would have stopped them from continuing on to applications and other things.

Would they have made Windows? Who knows. But they probably would have still been successful in the Macintosh space, and they very easily could have created Windows. Many companies had graphic GUI shells on top of MS-DOS.

There could have been a very interesting battle between MS and Lotus if MS did not have the DOS contract.


The OS Wars were hardly over.

CP/M was popular in businesses, but the C64 was outselling everything, everywhere else.

But even then, those CP/M installs were quirky and machine dependent. CP/M and MP/M differences, competing with the enormous variety of mini-computers (Dec, Prime, Data General, Alpha Micro, Pick, BASIC-4). This was the pre-Unix explosion that swept the mini computer market like CP/M did the 8080/Z80 market.

It just shows again how blinded by success they were at Commodore that they could not leverage their advantage to break in to other markets. The DOS similarity to CP/M certainly helped it, but that wasn't why it was successful.

VisiCalc started on the Apple, with it's crummy OS, and was The Application for Apples at the time.

For the PC, it was Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus ran on DOS, but DOS is not what made Lotus. Lotus made Lotus. They could have ported that to anything. DOS was not selling PCs, Lotus was. (Why yes, Lotus was ported to several Unix versions and machines.)

The point being, sure, DOS was like CP/M. It helped, but it wasn't the deal maker. DOS could have been anything as long as it offered some kind of command line, and reasonable abstractions over the disk, memory, and other devices (something, for example, UCSD P-System did NOT do -- P-System was much more primitive than DOS or CP/M).

Being an actual CP/M did not save CP/M-86, for example.

SQL Server was derived from Sybase which was always a *NIX product. MS ported it to Windows NT and fixed a lot of the bugs.

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Andrew Jacobs
6502 & PIC Stuff - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/
Cross-Platform 6502/65C02/65816 Macro Assembler - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/dev65/
Open Source Projects - https://github.com/andrew-jacobs

Yep. I was being funny (or trying to). I've used Sybase products for a long time.

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Cat; the other white meat.