5 ms·

Let's be frank. Gates was from the WASP elites, old money stuff. IBM would probably find a reason to give him the deal rather than to Gary no matter what.

acdha 1y ago
In particular, his mother – Mary Maxwell Gates – was on the United Way board along with IBM’s chairman John Opel and reportedly discussed her son’s company with Opel a few weeks before they made the decision to license MS-DOS. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-helped-her-son-start-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...
- WalterBright 1y ago
  There's little doubt that Ms Gates suggested that IBM look into Bill Gates, but I seriously doubt that IBM made the major business decision to contract with Gates because of his mother's suggestion.
  - 0xEF 1y ago
    So, and correct me if I am wrong, you don't think a little old fashioned nepotism happened like it does in pretty much every major industry?
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      Nepotism certainly happens, but companies that practice it rarely thrive. Ms Gates was not associated with IBM.
  - acdha 1y ago
    None of us know what was said but I have no reason to doubt it based on the reports of his subsequent conversations with lower-level IBM executives. It probably didn’t seem like an especially consequential decision both because neither Gates nor Kildall were especially proven at that time by the standards of a Goliath like IBM and the mainframe guys were notoriously dismissive of PCs (Opel came up through S/360). I’ve seen enough nepotism not to question the plausibility but it’s especially easy to imagine people high up the management ladder at the biggest mainframe manufacturer thinking it didn’t really matter which of the toy computer operating system vendors they picked. I didn’t work in that world then (that was my dad’s generation) but even in the mid-90s when I started working in tech it was not uncommon to find mainframe people who were dismissive of PC or Unix systems as non-serious.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      Ms Gates wasn't on the board of IBM, she was on the board of another company. That isn't nepotism. There is no way successful IBM would commit to Microsoft without a thorough vetting. Few remember, but IBM also sold CPM/86 for the PC. Kildall had his chance, and muffed it with the high price.
      - Tor3 1y ago
        I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's disfavour.
        WalterBright 1y ago
        As I recall, Kildall thought that CP/M-86 was much better than MSDOS, and people would pay the higher price. He was unable to make the case, though. I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better.
        skissane 1y ago
        > I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better. Comparing PC-DOS 1.0 to CP/M-86 1.0, I don’t think there are huge differences in features - maybe FAT12 is a more efficient filesystem; PC-DOS records file sizes to the byte, CP/M files are made up of 128 byte records, and although there is a filesystem attribute to say how many bytes in last record are used (file size mod 128), it has to be implemented at the application level; DOS had EXE files (wasn’t in SCP 86-DOS, was added by Microsoft), I think CP/M by then had something similar? Neither had directories yet, but CP/M had “user areas” which were a kind of limited equivalent. I think if they’d ported MP/M instead of CP/M (which I believe they did later), it would have been a more compelling offering-multitasking-but I suppose that would have made it even later to the market than it already was.
        canucker2016 1y ago
  - ChuckMcM 1y ago
    One way to look at it is that if IBM considered licensing MS-DOS and CP/M to be equivalent, which is to say either one would serve there purposes. Then I can easily see the Chairman of IBM putting a finger on the scale to swing it toward Ms. Gates son. It's like a two-fer[1], IBM is going to do a deal anyway and they figure either OS would work, and he gets a 'favor' point from a fellow board member who he might someday need their vote on a board decision down the road. Politics at that level is all about the banking of favors and opportunistically cashing them in. [1] "Two for one" -- two desirable outcomes from a single action.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      Ms Gates was not on the board of IBM. She was on the board of United Way.
      - ChuckMcM 1y ago
        The original comment said they were both on the board of United Way. Those are the votes he'd be curating. United Way, at the time, was the largest non-profit in the United States and it's mission was to funnel donations to "deserving" non-profits. Many companies, including IBM, had a payroll contribution you could make to United Way. The 'service' United Way provided was doing the research to avoid scam charities and non-profits. The old joke "I gave at the office" when a person comes to your door asking for donations, was in reference to giving to United Way and implicitly telling the solicitor that if they wanted a donation to go to United Way and convince them to give some of the donated money to their charity. As a result, being on the board gave a person tremendous soft power by giving them a direct impact on whether or not they chose to fund a non-profit. The way that expressed would be trips and junkets "for free" for United Way board members as a means of attempting to persuade them to fund a given non-profit. So let's say your kid starts a non-profit and you want other board members to advocate for it being funded. You, as the parent, have a conflict of interest and so must recuse yourself from that decision, but others on the board do not. Having someone in that meeting you can count on to make a solid case for your kids non-profit is worth a lot. Rich people giving advantages to other rich people is frowned upon as collusion and nepotism, but when you launder that through a giving non-profit and even better you get to use other peoples money, and avoid a whole passel of tax implications. Well who is going to complain that United Way is funding this non-profit versus another? They had so much money to give away it was no doubt easy to hide the less well supported donations from things like the Red Cross or mothers against drunk driving donations. That's the game at this level.
xen2xen1 1y ago
Gates had a version of DOS ready in 6 weeks, while DR was still planning DOS. MS got things going much faster.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  No. He ran out and acquired 86-DOS, from Seattle Computer Products. It's easy to have something when you buy it already complete. And DR had CP/M-86.
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Same thing, he did the needful to have something to give ibm.
  - whobre 1y ago
    DRI did not have CP/M-86 at that time which is the reason Tim Paterson developed 86-DOS in the first place.
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      CP/M-86 was first expected to be delivered in 1979, so I assume it existed in one form or another prior to that, shipments pending hardware availability. I wouldn't expect DRI to fund the adaptation without a cooperative manufacturer unless there were a significant installed base.
  - canucker2016 1y ago
    MS still had to make modifications to Tim Patterson's 86-DOS before it shipped as PC-DOS 1.0 - source: Paul Allen's Idea Man autobiography.
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      Of course - the PC didn't exist when SCP made 86-DOS. The same way as with CP/M, the hardware interface had to be written.
- 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
alexjplant 1y ago
I wrote a book report on a biography of Bill Gates when I was 7 or 8. It contained a youthful anecdote about his mother calling him on the house's intercom and him replying after several ignored attempts that "[he was] busy thinking. Maybe [she] should try it sometime!" An intercom? In a house? So that your mother didn't have to repeatedly yell up the stairs to your brother that food is on the table? Sure sounded like rich person stuff to me.

acdha 1y ago

In particular, his mother – Mary Maxwell Gates – was on the United Way board along with IBM’s chairman John Opel and reportedly discussed her son’s company with Opel a few weeks before they made the decision to license MS-DOS. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-helped-her-son-start-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...

WalterBright 1y ago
There's little doubt that Ms Gates suggested that IBM look into Bill Gates, but I seriously doubt that IBM made the major business decision to contract with Gates because of his mother's suggestion.
- 0xEF 1y ago
  So, and correct me if I am wrong, you don't think a little old fashioned nepotism happened like it does in pretty much every major industry?
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Nepotism certainly happens, but companies that practice it rarely thrive. Ms Gates was not associated with IBM.
- acdha 1y ago
  None of us know what was said but I have no reason to doubt it based on the reports of his subsequent conversations with lower-level IBM executives. It probably didn’t seem like an especially consequential decision both because neither Gates nor Kildall were especially proven at that time by the standards of a Goliath like IBM and the mainframe guys were notoriously dismissive of PCs (Opel came up through S/360). I’ve seen enough nepotism not to question the plausibility but it’s especially easy to imagine people high up the management ladder at the biggest mainframe manufacturer thinking it didn’t really matter which of the toy computer operating system vendors they picked. I didn’t work in that world then (that was my dad’s generation) but even in the mid-90s when I started working in tech it was not uncommon to find mainframe people who were dismissive of PC or Unix systems as non-serious.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Ms Gates wasn't on the board of IBM, she was on the board of another company. That isn't nepotism. There is no way successful IBM would commit to Microsoft without a thorough vetting. Few remember, but IBM also sold CPM/86 for the PC. Kildall had his chance, and muffed it with the high price.
    - Tor3 1y ago
      I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's disfavour.
      - WalterBright 1y ago
        As I recall, Kildall thought that CP/M-86 was much better than MSDOS, and people would pay the higher price. He was unable to make the case, though. I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better.
        skissane 1y ago
        > I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better. Comparing PC-DOS 1.0 to CP/M-86 1.0, I don’t think there are huge differences in features - maybe FAT12 is a more efficient filesystem; PC-DOS records file sizes to the byte, CP/M files are made up of 128 byte records, and although there is a filesystem attribute to say how many bytes in last record are used (file size mod 128), it has to be implemented at the application level; DOS had EXE files (wasn’t in SCP 86-DOS, was added by Microsoft), I think CP/M by then had something similar? Neither had directories yet, but CP/M had “user areas” which were a kind of limited equivalent. I think if they’d ported MP/M instead of CP/M (which I believe they did later), it would have been a more compelling offering-multitasking-but I suppose that would have made it even later to the market than it already was.
        canucker2016 1y ago
- ChuckMcM 1y ago
  One way to look at it is that if IBM considered licensing MS-DOS and CP/M to be equivalent, which is to say either one would serve there purposes. Then I can easily see the Chairman of IBM putting a finger on the scale to swing it toward Ms. Gates son. It's like a two-fer[1], IBM is going to do a deal anyway and they figure either OS would work, and he gets a 'favor' point from a fellow board member who he might someday need their vote on a board decision down the road. Politics at that level is all about the banking of favors and opportunistically cashing them in. [1] "Two for one" -- two desirable outcomes from a single action.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Ms Gates was not on the board of IBM. She was on the board of United Way.
    - ChuckMcM 1y ago
      The original comment said they were both on the board of United Way. Those are the votes he'd be curating. United Way, at the time, was the largest non-profit in the United States and it's mission was to funnel donations to "deserving" non-profits. Many companies, including IBM, had a payroll contribution you could make to United Way. The 'service' United Way provided was doing the research to avoid scam charities and non-profits. The old joke "I gave at the office" when a person comes to your door asking for donations, was in reference to giving to United Way and implicitly telling the solicitor that if they wanted a donation to go to United Way and convince them to give some of the donated money to their charity. As a result, being on the board gave a person tremendous soft power by giving them a direct impact on whether or not they chose to fund a non-profit. The way that expressed would be trips and junkets "for free" for United Way board members as a means of attempting to persuade them to fund a given non-profit. So let's say your kid starts a non-profit and you want other board members to advocate for it being funded. You, as the parent, have a conflict of interest and so must recuse yourself from that decision, but others on the board do not. Having someone in that meeting you can count on to make a solid case for your kids non-profit is worth a lot. Rich people giving advantages to other rich people is frowned upon as collusion and nepotism, but when you launder that through a giving non-profit and even better you get to use other peoples money, and avoid a whole passel of tax implications. Well who is going to complain that United Way is funding this non-profit versus another? They had so much money to give away it was no doubt easy to hide the less well supported donations from things like the Red Cross or mothers against drunk driving donations. That's the game at this level.

xen2xen1 1y ago

Gates had a version of DOS ready in 6 weeks, while DR was still planning DOS. MS got things going much faster.

rbanffy 1y ago
No. He ran out and acquired 86-DOS, from Seattle Computer Products. It's easy to have something when you buy it already complete. And DR had CP/M-86.
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Same thing, he did the needful to have something to give ibm.
- whobre 1y ago
  DRI did not have CP/M-86 at that time which is the reason Tim Paterson developed 86-DOS in the first place.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    CP/M-86 was first expected to be delivered in 1979, so I assume it existed in one form or another prior to that, shipments pending hardware availability. I wouldn't expect DRI to fund the adaptation without a cooperative manufacturer unless there were a significant installed base.
- canucker2016 1y ago
  MS still had to make modifications to Tim Patterson's 86-DOS before it shipped as PC-DOS 1.0 - source: Paul Allen's Idea Man autobiography.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    Of course - the PC didn't exist when SCP made 86-DOS. The same way as with CP/M, the hardware interface had to be written.
1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

alexjplant 1y ago

I wrote a book report on a biography of Bill Gates when I was 7 or 8. It contained a youthful anecdote about his mother calling him on the house's intercom and him replying after several ignored attempts that "[he was] busy thinking. Maybe [she] should try it sometime!" An intercom? In a house? So that your mother didn't have to repeatedly yell up the stairs to your brother that food is on the table? Sure sounded like rich person stuff to me.