On Tue, 12 Nov 2013, dave wrote:

On 11/12/2013 03:14 AM, John Williamson wrote:
William Sommerwerck wrote:
"sctvguy1" wrote in message ...
On Mon, 11 Nov 2013 16:05:27 -0800, William Sommerwerck wrote:

Were you working there when Bill Gates was using OS/2 on his
own desktop?

I was there during the period of OS/2's brief popularity.

Was OS/2 particularly crash prone, or are you referring to the fact
that it needed the Presentation Manager for a graphic interface?


I took it as more of a suggestion that the owner and creator of
Microsoft didn't want to use a Microsft OS on his own machine.

Of course, it could just have been research to find out just how bad
OS/2 was....


Creator of Microsoft? Gates helped write CPM, a little bit of BASIC. Quick
and Dirty Operating System was bought pretty much turnkey. Since then it's
been Bill and Steve as Mr and Mrs Pacman, gobbling up other people's ideas.

No, Swif****er Bill had nothing to do with CPM.

Gary Kildall wrote CPM, over at Digital Research.

Bill and Microsoft were only about BASIC for some years, so common that
for a while just about any computer you could buy had a Microsoft BASIC
for it, many with it in ROM. Perhaps towards the end of that period they
had some other languages to offer.

When the IBM PC came along, they apparently went to Microsoft thinking
they put out CPM (I seem to recall one reason for this error was because
Microsoft did have a CP/M card for the Apple II, their first foray into
hardware), and so Microsoft sent them to Digital Research. Some foul up
(the stories vary) sent them back to Microsoft, to ask them if they could
make an operating system. That's when they bought QDOS from Seattle
Microsystems, and turned it into PCDOS.

Of course, QDOS is said to be similar to CPM.

Michael