David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Specifically, they asked Microsoft for programming languages. They're like, we're making this great PC, we're going to need a BASIC. We think you guys are working on a COBOL. We'd like some COBOL. Yeah, Fortran. Give us the whole thing. There's some debate on whether it was the Microsoft side or the IBM side that really saw the vision of, hey, the 16-bit generation is going to enable real business software use cases on the personal computer, but it doesn't matter. That's the plan here, and that is absolutely what happens. These initial discussions are for the programming language. Microsoft doesn't make an operating system at this point, because in the 8-bit generation, the operating system, I think, was a glorified bootloader to just get into the programming environment so that you could either write or load up the BASIC programs that Microsoft was going to interpret and then run. In the 8-bit generation, most, if not all hardware providers of microcomputers just wrote their own operating systems. It just wasn't a big deal. Now, there was one off-the-shelf operating system out there from a company called Digital Research, which was run by Gary Kildall, who, I think as we talked about earlier, Bill and Paul had actually intersected with back in Seattle. Yup. I think they were reasonably friendly.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.