Microsoft's MS-DOS Turns 30 Today

It’s MS-DOS’s birthday today, on this day 30 years ago Bill Gates gave this famed operating system its name, kind of. If you’ve watched Pirates of Silicone Valley or know the history of Microsoft you know that MS-DOS was created by Seattle Computer Products and later sold to Bill Gates.

Seattle Computer Products at many times was also called QDOS and 86-DOS as it was being developed. When it was first created, it was made to run on a CPU card that was custom-made based on Intel’s 8086 processor.

Long, long ago IBM came to Microsoft’s Bill Gates asking for a 16-bit operating system, at the time Bill only talked about an operating system and didn’t have anything really put together. So when big boy IBM came knocking at the door they had to get something quick.

Rather than writing a new operating system for IBM they quickly went out and turned to Seattle Computer Products. So, Microsoft ended up buying a non-exclusive license from them for $25,000. Microsoft got a great start after that and the following Spring hired away the author Tim Paterson. From then on they paid another $50,000 for all right of the program. After so, Microsoft built up the operating system and started to ship to IBM. From then on, Bill Gates and Paul Allen turned into two of the world’s richest men.

So congratulations Microsoft, here’s your cake.