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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week
05/19/2010 All the Mt. St. Helens news today got me thinking about what was going
on in the pc industry 30 years ago – there was no WWW, email, social networking sites
– why there wasn’t even the IBM PC which started the revolution
... History
of the Microcomputer Revolution - Part 11 - IBM's Secret IBM had been watching the emerging
PC marketplace. By 1980 the company had made a couple feeble attempts at their
own PC products. One was the IBM 5100 computer which was a big desktop with a
tiny screen, and the Datamaster - another future
failure. IBM's chairman at the time decided
to take a different approach, and gathered a group of the company's renegade
successful managers - wild ducks in IBM-speak - to start a project code named
the Manhattan project. Its mission was to explore building a PC that the
market really wanted, and to try to end the embarrassment of the world's
largest computer company being beaten out by the long haired kids from Apple,
and to build it in a non-IBM company way. IBM approached Microsoft under
pretense of doing a market survey, requesting Microsoft to sign a
non-disclosure agreement which would enable IBM to disavow the meeting ever
happened - and asked Bill Gates for his opinions on what a PC should have and
do. His ideas included using the new
Intel 8086 16 bit processor for better performance, and desiring the computer
to have better graphics and several other features not found in the current
generation of PC's. IBM soon returned with the
admission that they were interested in building their own PC and were
considering using many of Gates' ideas. They asked if Microsoft would be
able to write a special version of Basic for this PC project, Microsoft had already written a
version of Basic for Intel for their new 8086 processor, and readily agreed. This new generation PC would need
an operating system, so Gates recommended IBM contact his friend Gary Kildall
at Digital Research - who had written the CP/M operating system. But Gary
refused to sign IBM's non-disclosure agreement and IBM wrote him off as a
potential partner. Wanting desperately to be part of
this new project, Microsoft committed to writing the operating system also -
although they had never written one before. Fate smiled on Microsoft in this proceeding. Someone at Microsoft remembered
talking to a Seattle hacker who had already built a prototype computer using
the new Intel 8086 and who had written his own operating
system for it. This individual - whose name was
Tim Patterson - had previously talked to Microsoft employees and had been
very interested in the File Allocation method that Microsoft Basic used. He
worked for a local company named Seattle Computer Products and had written an
operating system which
he had named QDOS - for quick and dirty operating system. Microsoft bought QDOS from Seattle
Computer Products -
renamed it to MS-DOS and the rest is PC history from 30 years
ago, when we were all covered with ash. . |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2009 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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