Re: [cobalt-users] RAQ2 Sendmail & Hotmail

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jens Kristian Søgaard wrote:

> Remember, Microsoft started out being a company reselling Unix
> licenses... :-)

Where did this piece of misinformation come from, Jens?

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft to market Bill Gates'
"GW-BASIC" (Gee-Whiz Beginners' Allpurpose Symbolic Instruction Code)
for 8080s, as I recall.  He visited us often, driving in from
Albuquerque, to sell us copies (at the Homebrew Computer Club, meeting
in Gordon French's garage, before it moved to the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Lab) on tape.

The earliest copies had their own tape-drive operating system, and
didn't require any kind of DOS or any other operating system for that
matter.

Here's a quote from the Paul Allen biography at
"http://www.paulallen.com/":

1975:
Allen and Gates write the first microcomputer BASIC for the Altair, a
computer kit based on Intel's new 8080 chip.  They move to Albuquerque,
N.M., where Altair's producer MITS makes Allen its associate director of
software.  Allen divides his time between MITS and a new company he and
Gates have started to develop and market microcomputer languages: Micro
Soft.

And another:

1977:
Apple commissions Microsoft to supply a version of its BASIC for the
hot-selling Apple II. Radio Shack buys a Microsoft BASIC for its TRS-80.

It was a few years later that Microsoft bought a license and wrote some
bios code to market Xenix for the TRS-80 Model II.

(I used Allen's biography as a reference rather than Gates' because I
trust it to be more accurate; certainly more accurate than my memory.)

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
nobaloney.net
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