Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I'm pretty sure he was flying his personal airplane while this happens. Some reports are he was just out joyriding and missed it. Some reports are no, he was on a business trip, knew it was happening, but he had another important business meeting. He didn't know that this was IBM that was coming. Regardless, it doesn't really matter because IBM just wants the operating system. Dorothy does meet with them. She's unwilling to sign their NDA. There's a lawyer from Digital Research who gets involved, and he doesn't really understand what's going on. The punchline is that IBM leaves this interaction with the belief that Gary and Digital Research aren't up for working with them and aren't capable of producing here. Producing is important because it's not like the existing CP/M OS that they made would work here. They would have to write a new version, a 16-bit version, and they hadn't done that yet. In particular, they would have to do some customizing. But part of what IBM wants is a customized version of an operating system for the IBM PC. They don't want this to be fully off-the-shelf. Just to add one more stir the pot of history here, there is another version of this story where Gary does actually have a conversation with IBM, and it blows up over licensing terms. What Gary really wants is a significant royalty of every IBM PC sold, and IBM walks over that. Whether that happened or whether it's just an NDA issue, either way, I think we all know the IBM PC did not end up running the CP/M operating system. That's amazing. I didn't know that. We'll talk about that when we get to the business terms of the Microsoft IBM deal in a minute. But for the moment, there's no deal yet because an operating system needs to be provided here. IBM goes back to Microsoft and they're like, hey, this guy you referred us to ain't going to work. The way that I read some quotes from the IBM people here were like, we just threw the problem back in Microsoft's lap of you guys deal with this, you source an operating system. I'd like to say that Bill, Steve, and Microsoft, you don't need to give them an opportunity twice. In this case, you did need to give them an opportunity twice because they almost flubbed it and sent IBM down to see Gary. This time they don't flub it. They're like, okay, we'll get you an operating system.…

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