When AT&T started directly marketing UNIX in the 1980s, Microsoft decided not to compete with them. They gradually transferred Xenix ownership to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) by the late 1980s. 2. The Catalyst: Project Chess and MS-DOS (1981)
This moment established the commercial software industry. Before Microsoft, software was largely seen as something that came free with hardware. Gates argued that software was intellectual property—a standalone product worth paying for. first microsoft os
This is the story of , Microsoft’s very first operating system product. When AT&T started directly marketing UNIX in the
Paul Allen moved to Albuquerque, while Gates stayed at Harvard, often coding in the university's computer labs. They had no Altair to test their code on; they were writing blindly, simulating how the Altair’s processor would behave. The Catalyst: Project Chess and MS-DOS (1981) This
In July 1980, IBM approached Microsoft for a secret project code-named . IBM was building its first mainstream personal computer (the IBM PC) and urgently needed an operating system. The Quick Dirty Operating System (QDOS)
It was a bluff. They hadn’t written a single line of code.