David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Well, to contextualize all this, we want to go back almost all the way to the beginning, right around the time you joined Microsoft, and talk about Microsoft’s relationship with IBM. Before the IBM PC and before DOS, can you catch listeners up who weren’t around at that time, what was IBM in that era? I think you called it to us, and when we were talking to you for research, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Yeah, I did, I think. Well, it’s 1980 when I got here. The company started obviously in 1975. There were IBM computers and a couple of others. But literally, people would say there’s IBM and the bunch. The bunch was Burroughs’ UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell. But they were just the bunch. IBM did the mainframe, and it did the software, and it did the service. It did everything in computing. Everything. Everything. Then you had this little upstart try again called Digital Equipment, very important in our story because Dave Cutler, who was the father of Windows NT, came from Digital Equipment. They were fighting, they were scrappy, they were mini computers, so smaller than a room, but definitely bigger than a PC, if you will. All the initial Microsoft software was developed actually on DEC computers. Digital Equipment equals DEC, and DEC had a nice business, but it was a lot smaller than IBM. If IBM breathed, that was the direction the computer industry would go. IBM was the subject of an antitrust lawsuit, shockingly in 1969, that didn’t actually get settled (I think) to shortly after I got here in the term of Reagan. So 11 years they’d been living because they were that big and bad and mighty.…

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