On 02/05/2016 11:56 AM, Bill Woodger wrote: > Well, two things: Yes there were, and with several names, and I'd now only > say possibly MS-DOS. Although MS-DOS possibly/probably wouldn't have existed > without IBM; the much later appearance of the IBM PC in the UK than in the US > also influenced my typing, as there were any number of MS-DOS-based machines > available before the IBM PC was on sale in the UK (there were even "grey > market" imports to satisfy demand in the UK). It is the latter that made me > type that, rather than any detailed knowledge on exactly what appeared first. > > > On Friday, 5 February 2016 17:36:58 UTC, Tom Marchant wrote: >> On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 06:43:59 -0600, Bill Woodger wrote: >> >>> the original "IBM PC-type" (although pre-dating the IBM PC) operating >>> system from Microsoft. >> There was no operating system from Microsoft that predated the IBM PC. >> >> -- >> Tom Marchant >> My recollection of history is that Bill Gates implied to IBM he had an Operating System for the 8086 and contracted to supply IBM an Operating system for their new IBM PC in 1981 when in fact he had no 8086 Operating System to supply (perhaps a little dubious, but turned out to be a VERY profitable gamble). He then proceeded to try to find an existing 8086 Operating System to purchase as a starting point. The first contact he tried was out of town, so instead he hired the author of 86-DOS (originally named QDOS) and bought the rights to 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for only $75K, enhanced it just enough to meet IBM's requirements, and MS-DOS was born.
There definitely was no MS-DOS prior to the IBM PC because it was a renamed version of 86-DOS, created specifically for Microsoft's contract to supply IBM with an IBM PC Operating System, and was first offered by IBM with the IBM PC as PC DOS in 3Q 1981. Within a year variants of MS-DOS were licensed by Microsoft for many non-IBM 8086 platforms. Perhaps IBM-PC-compatible hardware with MS-DOS may have been available in the UK prior to the IBM-PC, but that would be a marketing issue. MS-DOS was a single-user system created for the IBM-PC, and this was the first 8086 Operating System produced by Microsoft. Prior to MS-DOS Microsoft marketed a "Unix" Operating System XENIX which initially was Version 7 Unix from AT&T, but it was a totally different code base and design philosophy, and also wasn't ported to the 8086 platform until 1982. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#cite_note-9> -- Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
