well, like people said "it is better be lucky than good!". The college dropout, who wasn't smart enough to invent OS, though good enough to invent a compiler, was blessed by hidden hands. I think Bill Gates was destined to be rich and famous! God had plan for him instead of Gary Kildall, whose original OS was even recommended by Bill Gates. Gary Kildall could have been Bill Gates! Even Microcrash owner isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, though I think he had vision for computer technologies that PC's are the future for how people/companies would work, and he embraced the vision, and ran with it.
from wiki,
"
IBM dealings[edit]
IBM approached Digital Research in 1980, at
Bill Gates' suggestion,
[9] to negotiate the purchase of a forthcoming version of CP/M called
CP/M-86 for the
IBM PC. Gary had left negotiations to his wife, Dorothy, as he usually did, while he and colleague and developer of
MP/M operating system
Tom Rolander used Gary's private airplane to deliver software to manufacturer
Bill Godbout.
[4][10] Before the IBM representatives would explain the purpose of their visit, they insisted that Dorothy sign a
non-disclosure agreement. On the advice of DRI attorney Gerry Davis, Dorothy refused to sign the agreement without Gary's approval. Gary returned in the afternoon and tried to move the discussion with IBM forward, but accounts disagree on whether he signed the non-disclosure agreement, as well as if he ever met with the IBM representatives.
[11]
Various reasons have been given for the two companies failing to reach an agreement. DRI, which had only a few products, might have been unwilling to sell its main product to IBM for a one-time payment rather than its usual
royalty-based plan.
[12] Dorothy might have believed that the company could not deliver CP/M-86 on IBM's proposed schedule, as the company was busy developing an implementation of the
PL/I programming language for
Data General.
[13] Also possible, the IBM representatives might have been annoyed that DRI had spent hours on what they considered a routine formality.
[10] According to Kildall, the IBM representatives took the same flight to
Florida that night that he and Dorothy took for their vacation, and they negotiated further on the flight, reaching a handshake agreement. IBM lead negotiator Jack Sams insisted that he never met Gary, and one IBM colleague has confirmed that Sams said so at the time. He accepted that someone else in his group might have been on the same flight, but noted that he flew back to Seattle to talk with
Microsoft again.
[10]
Sams related the story to Gates, who had already agreed to provide a
BASIC interpreter and several other programs for the PC. Gates' impression of the story was that Gary capriciously "went flying", as he would later tell reporters.
[14] Sams left Gates with the task of finding a usable operating system, and a few weeks later he proposed using the operating system
86-DOS—an independently developed operating system that implemented Kildall's CP/M
API—from
Seattle Computer Products (SCP).
Paul Allen negotiated a licensing deal with SCP. Allen had 86-DOS adapted for IBM's hardware, and IBM shipped it as
IBM PC DOS.
[11]
Kildall obtained a copy of PC DOS, examined it, and concluded that it infringed on CP/M. When he asked Gerry Davis what legal options were available, Davis told him that intellectual property law for software was not clear enough to sue.
[15] Instead Kildall only threatened IBM with legal action, and IBM responded with a proposal to offer CP/M-86 as an option for the PC in return for a release of liability.
[16] Kildall accepted, believing that IBM's new system (like its previous personal computers) would not be a significant commercial success.
[17] When the IBM PC was introduced, IBM sold its operating system as an unbundled option. One of the operating system options was PC DOS, priced at US$40. PC DOS was seen as a practically necessary option; most software titles required it and without it the IBM PC was limited to its built-in
Cassette BASIC. CP/M-86 shipped a few months later six times more expensive at US$240, but sold poorly against DOS and enjoyed far less software support.
[4]
"Kildall was annoyed when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer science program anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to Gates, a dropout from Harvard"
