“Now there lived in that city a man poor but wise, and he saved the city by his wisdom. But nobody remembered that poor man.” ~ King Solomon, Ecc. 9:15 ——— Hold on to your seats, because this version of the story is not going to be told loudly, but it’s all true. Here goes. The first commercially successful Operating System wasn’t Windows or anything from Microsoft. A lesser known figure, Gary Kildall, a Computer Science professor, created CP/M, the standard operating system for many computers in the 70s. He created the entire OS by himself, a true one man army, so it was especially remarkable that he had the BEST product for his time. His product was so good that many programmers of his era read his manual and created clones of his CP/M product. He didn’t mind. They were all subpar. In 1980, IBM needed an Operating System for their computers and they approached the godfather, Gary Kildall. Due to legal misunderstandings, negotiations broke down and they couldn’t come to an agreement. IBM still badly needed an Operating System but Gary Kildall seemed to be the only one with a decent product. Incidentally, IBM’s CEO, John Opel, served on the national United Way board at the same time Mary Gates also served on the board. Mary Gates had previously served as the first ever female chairperson of the King County branch of United Way. Now serving at the national level (alongside IBM’s John Opel), she was already a power player. She got wind of the fact that IBM was still looking for an OS, so she approached John Opel and told him that her son, Bill, was working on software at Microsoft. “Take a meeting with Bill and see if he has what you need”, she asked. John met with Bill and told them what they needed. Bill Gates didn’t have any software that was good enough for IBM, but he didn’t tell them that. He said, “Hold my coffee. I’ll be right back.” He probably knew that IBM had already approached Gary Kildall, so there was no use going there. So he looked around to see if anyone had made a half decent copy of Gary Kildall’s CP/M. Aha! One of the clones was called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), created by Tim Paterson. Tim basically copied Gary Kildall’s OS by diligently reading his manuals, but that didn’t matter. It worked. And that’s all the 24-year old Bill Gates needed. Bill approached Tim and purchased the full rights to QDOS for $50,000 He changed the name by removing the ‘Q’ and adding his company name ‘MS’, making it MSDOS. Then he went back to IBM and said, “Still holding my coffee, big bro? I have what you need now.” He didn’t even resell it. He licensed it to them and hired its creator, Tim Paterson, to assist with the IBM integration. You see, after high school, Bill enrolled at Harvard to study Law. Even though he dropped out, he had an advanced knowledge of legal structures, coupled with the fact that his father was a top lawyer. This entire power play laid the foundation of a trillion-dollar company. Back to Gary Kildall. His CP/M faded out of relevance. As I mentioned earlier, Tim Paterson joined Microsoft after selling QDOS for $50,000 Bill Gates went on to grow the company into a trillion-dollar company. ————— “Now there lived in that city a man poor but wise, and he saved the city by his wisdom. But nobody remembered that poor man.” ~ King Solomon, Ecc. 9:15 ————— The education of Kings is different than the education of peasants. I know that your minds are alight with aha moments and ideas 💡 I appreciate that. I’ll be back here to connect the dots with my own takeaways for you. But not for free. *_This time, I want 3,000 reactions on this post._* Rooting for you, — J.O.