Had the suits at IBM not been a bunch of male chauvinist pigs, Bill Gates would be a mere footnote in the history of computing.
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi and all that.
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I'm missing something here or is this just an opinion?
Posted by: rob | Friday, 13 May 2022 at 10:32
Industry folklore, from way-back-when... IBM needed an operating system for the new PC, and CP/M was the obvious choice, but the deal didn't happen and so they ended up with MS-DOS instead.
The usual (1990s-era) version of how the deal fell through holds that Gary Kildall blew off the meeting and left his wife to deal with it.
The version I heard from someone closer to that corner of history says that Kildall was off on an urgent business trip, and his wife would have been the one to handle a business meeting in any case, since she handled the business side of Digital Research while he was the technical side, but the suits from IBM didn't take her seriously.
Wikipedia has yet a third variation on the tale, but that too involves the suits being unreasonable, possibly because they found themselves unexpectedly dealing with a woman.
Posted by: Eric Wilner | Friday, 13 May 2022 at 10:56