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 wa

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”.