The partnership with IBM provided an opportunity, so Microsoft and IBM agreed to collaborate on a successor to MS-DOS called OS/2. With the end of the monopoly, that bar also came to an end.īill Gates understood that AT&T’s entry would severely weaken all other Unix vendors (as it did, leading to the so-called ‘Unix wars’), so immediately started looking for alternatives.
WINDOWS UNIX LINUX MAC OS SOFTWARE
AT&T had licensed Unix so widely, including to Microsoft, because the agreement granting it a telephone monopoly in the US had also barred it from entering the computer or software businesses itself. The earthquake was the breakup of the Bell System.
In 1982, a legal earthquake led Bill Gates to completely change Microsoft’s strategy and abandon Unix, despite the fact that Microsoft was the leading vendor of Unix at the time. It was just a stop-gap until mass-market hardware became powerful enough to run Xenix. Microsoft had already licensed Microsoft Basic to Commodore and Apple, so the IBM deal was just one of many, and MS-DOS was not viewed as a strategic OS. MS-DOS was basically a copy of CP/M, which Microsoft acquired so it could license Microsoft Basic to IBM. It rapidly became the most popular variant of Unix, but like all Unix systems, it required much more advanced hardware than low-end operating systems like CP/M. Microsoft’s version of Unix, called Xenix, was first released in 1980 (before MS-DOS). In Bill Gates’s initial strategy, devised in the 1970s, Unix was to be the core of the Microsoft platform. There's a huge amount of path dependency in how Windows, OS X and Linux came to exist as they are. Found this interesting 'historical' story about Windows