What if MS had never bought QDOS?

[jpenguin]

Would Seattle Computer Productions be where MS is now? Or would Digital Research, Inc & Gary Kildall be at the top? Maybe Apple could have been what the majority of people use.

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[MoonRise]

I often wonder on a similar path for Commodore really. What if they really knew what they had and invested more in product development. I mean they really weren't too far off to the below possibility.

[GreyGeek]

Wikipeida has a nice writeup:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

In his memoirs he wrote:

Kildall was annoyed when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer science program anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to Gates, a dropout from Harvard. In response he started writing his memoir, Computer Connections.^[15] The memoir,^[22][23][24] which he distributed only to a few friends, expressed his frustration that people did not seem to value elegance in software,^[18] and it said of Gates, "He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry." In an appendix he called DOS "plain and simple theft" because its first 26 system calls worked the same as CP/M's

In the summer of 1978 I went looking for a solution to a problem I had teaching at the local highschool -- cheating by jocks who would play hookie on test day and then threaten the geeks to give them answers to the tests. At a local Team Electronics store in Grand Island, NE, I saw an Apple ][+ setting on display. I asked if I could see it being displayed. The manager, Don D., said there was no one around who could run it. I asked to see the manuals and if I could set down and teach myself. He agreed. For two months I went to G.I. every Saturday and set at the computer teaching myself BASIC ][ and how to operate the Apple. It was an easy and fun task. By the beginning of September I had written a grade book program and a testing program that took a pool of questions and created various tests of equal difficulty, printing the keyed answers in the right margin. I cut the right margins off with a bar cutter before handing out the test. The jocks had no choice but to show up and take the test. Even peaking over someone else's shoulder or passing answers on scraps of papers was useless.

While I was teaching myself to use the Apple crowds of people started gathering around and watching. Some would ask questions and I would answer them and give little demos. They's ask about buying and I would tell them that "I don't work here." Then Don D. came and proposed that if I continued demoing the Apple ][+ on Saturdays he'd sell me one at cost. I agreed. My first Apple, in September of 1978, #1726 (IIRC) looked like this:

A couple weeks later I sold a computer setup similar to that shown in the video, but also including a Centronics 779 line printer for $5,000. The profit was $2,500. My cut was $1,250. At the time I was the 2nd highest paid school teacher at the school I was teaching at. I was taking home $700/month. The computer tail started wagging the teacher dog. I wrote the software for that first computer sale. It was for a crop dusting pilot to keep track of his books. A year later VISICALC came out and Apples started selling a lot faster, and I didn't have to write as much code.

The competitors at the time were the TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet. Together they were the "holy trinity".
I chose the more expensive Apple while examining the TRS-80 I broke a polystyrene panel off of a port just trying to open it. When demonstrating the Apple people would often ask "how durable is it?". I'm 6'6". I'd hold it over my head and give it a toss into the air (without the monitor or disk drives). The Apple lid would usually go flying, keys would sometimes pop off the board. I'd pick them up, re-seat the chips in their sockets, replace the keys and snap the lid back on. Plug in the disk drives and monitor and printer and turn it on. Not once did an Apple fail to boot up after that drop demo. I didn't originate that test. An Apple tech guy came to G.I. to train me in support and maintenance of Apples, and set up our parts and service bay. He showed me that drop test.
Later USCD Pascal came out and until 1983 I used that dev tool to make a living until I switched to Borland's Turbo Pascal 3.02A with the DB Lunchbox.

In 1977 I had also done a search for a useful computer to help me with tests and this was the best I found at the time:

You'll recognize it as the computer in War Games, which was a later model shown below. By 1977, instead of address, data and command toggle switches, used as shown in the video above, it had a monitor and disk drives and ran the CP/M OS from Gary Kildall. It used the S-100 BUS, which was riding on the peak of an advertizing blitz at the time and everyone thought that the CP/M on the S-100 BUS was the OS of the future. It had the 8080 CPU. but that model was too expensive for my budget.



The 8080 was a superior 8 & 16 bit CPU but the 6502 was cheaper, and it won on price. Not that Apple was cheap. As the Cadillac of computers at the time it wasn't, but the competitors were so cheaply built and almost the same price so taking the small jump to Apple was a no-brainer.

Later, around 1983, I sold that Apple for about what I paid for it and used the money to buy an IBM PC XT.



With PC DOS. What attracted me was the name IBM and the 10Mb HD. A real barn! Never thought I'd ever fill it up. Backups were on the floppies.

Kidall became a millionaire selling his DRI company for millions, but later I read where he became an alcoholic and suffered a brain injury during a fall. He was not a businessman and Gates took advantage of him. Gates, in addition to being as smart or smarter than Dr. Kidall, he was trained by his Washington lawyer father and was as clever as anyone could be, besides being an excellent assembler language programmer. He probably would have risen to the top with or without QDOS from Seattle Computing, which was, after all, nothing but a ripoff of Unix.

[kenj70]

"Ah, yes, I remember it well."

As a Civil Service metrology calibration and repair tech I remember the computer revolution coming at me quite fast. I followed the developments but avoided the digital revolution until it was very obvious it was taking over. I started playing around with a rather unreliable Heath computer and terminal at work just to get familiar with the new tech. When the first IBM clones came in I was one of the first to crack the cover and see the mysteries inside. They were ordered with 5 megabyte hard disk drives but came in with 10 MB units. We wondered what we would do with all that storage space! DOS 1.0 was VERY unimpressive. A few months later DOS 2.0 came in and NOW I knew we were in business. Segregating the files in "directories" was going to be quite useful.

I have avoided the "religion" of Apple forever. The worker bees at the SeaTac Apple Store are called evangelists! Billy Gates was OK since he was a collage drop out although I did hear that he pulled some shenanigans with Gary Kildall. Recall Microsoft was sued by the Feds for some antitrust problems. I think his "betters" gave him a stern talking to. Now, his tampering with vaccines labels him as a NWO globalist. I often go on day hikes near his folks Hood Canal waterfront property. I've never seen the dude though.

Soon after the IBM clones came out Zenith (remember Zenith?) the owner of Benton Harbor MI Heathkit came out with a commercial all-in-one PC that used the S-100 bus internally. I thought sure that was going to be the marketplace winner and I begged our purchasing guys to get some of those. They didn't - and I'm sure glad because the market went with the IBM bus.

-=Ken=-

[GreyGeek]

What if MS had never bought QDOS?

Not only have I heard of Zenith, I became interested in electronics in college and continued that interest in grad school. I have built a LOT of HeathKits(before they were bought) offered, including their color TV. I built their DX-60 amateur radio transmitter, a 60W code transmitter that I paired with the ssb HR-10 receiver and a homebuilt whittle bug. I fed the signal into a 15' cubical quad antenna just outside my home office window where I could manually rotate the shaft to aim the quad for maximum reception. On 60W I got 5by9's from Japan.


As you can tell, my electronics was on the tail end of the vaccume tube technology. In grad school, at the same time, I was taking an electronics course which featured transistors, VLSIC, EPROMS, etc...

My grid dip meter was Heathkit (can't find a pic of it but I used it to tune the antennas and coils I built), the EU-20M strip chart recorder, voltmeter, oscilloscope, and I built the EC-1 Analog computer and used it to teach physics in HS


and a bunch more stuff I can't recall the names of. During the last year of grad school I began doing QRP, and trying to "Work All States", but there was too much noise from big radio stations swamping the signal. Catching skip from the east or west coast on 1W was lots of fun though.

When I purchased my first PC in September of 1978 I dropped my electronics habit altogether because I didn't have the time or the money for it, but it gave me the necessary skill and experience to build my own desktop, and to repair a LOT of desktops and laptops.

[kenj70]

Wow! Nice gear. And YES, I remember it well.

I built my own CW transmitter and bought an old surplus ARC-5 receiver. I had to be pretty frugal i those days.

-=Ken ex-K7YGO=-

[GreyGeek]

A poor college student who worked 38 hours a week to support his family and took 12 hours of classes per semester and summer sessions for three years knows what "frugal" means! In grad school, however, I was paid for 20 hrs a week maintaining the electronic analytical equipment and doing the CH&N analyses. In addition, a Welch Research Foundation (the grape juice people) grant to do graduate research in anti-cancer metabolites paid me more per year for three years than my first teaching job did.

[kenj70]

Admirable work ethic and energy! And, you were blessed.

I got my Technician license in High School. Once I got on line I didn't renew my Ham license.

-=Ken=-

[GreyGeek]

Admirable work ethic and energy! And, you were blessed.

I got my Technician license in High School. Once I got on line I didn't renew my Ham license.

-=Ken=-

My call sign was WN5VSX (Novice!). Once I did the QRP thing and got good signal reports from Japan with a 60W rig into a homemade 15' cubical quad antenna I had one remaining problem: While with my whittle bug I could send 15-20 wpm I could only read at 5-10 wpm. Faster operators don't like hamming with slow ones. And, at the time, you couldn't go to voice until you could transmit and receive at, IIRC, 15 wpm, to qualify for the advanced license. Then the FCC changed reqs and some license came out (I can't remember its name) but it allowed people to side step the Morse code requirement and go straight to voice. About the same time I got into doing my thesis research and writing my thesis and I didn't have any time left for radio & electronics or golf. When I graduated and started teaching I never had time to restart any of those hobbies, except for building gray box computers for myself.

[GreyGeek]

I often wonder on a similar path for Commodore really. What if they really knew what they had and invested more in product development. I mean they really weren't too far off to the below possibility.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]7574[/ATTACH]

That was a mod by Ben Heck who used C64 parts and other odds and ends to craft that laptop about 12 years ago. It never was an offering by Commodore but Ben did a terrific job. Commodore's laptop looked more like an electronics oscilloscope with keyboard and was called the SX-64.

[woodsmoke]

jpenguine

Please let me reference something from Bill Gates biography:

QUASIQUOTE

He often went into the "high school" library to "wander the books"...no yes...was it a "FULL BORE" library? NO...it was a "high school library" and he became bored...

the librarian offered to him to:

a) restock books...

he did that and a few week later became bored...

the librarian offered to him to...

b) "produce the DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM number for "some books"...

In other words...

AT A VERY EARLY AGE...

he was offered the opportunity to...

THINK...

THINK...

about "organizing information"...

WELL...

If one can "organize information" then one can "PROJECT" from that information...

that is the WHOLE POINT of "the scientific method"...

A LOT OF PEOPLE CAN THROW DARTS AT A BOARD and

LATER claim "success"...

GATES...

LUCKED OUT...

HIS PROJECTION WORKED!!!

BACK TO THE QUESTION

What would have happened...

THE OLD WOODSMOKER THINKS...

that "Linux" would not be here...

Because Jobs,who walked within a physical mainframe occupying a whole building...

was "...free form..."...

so...

It really is...the opinion of the old woodsmoker that ...

rather like "Batman being there BECAUSE of the Joker"...

there is a WHOLE COMIC CYCLE about if the Joker was not there the Batman would not have appeared...



wood

THIS IS ALL VERY STRANGE...

smoke

[woodsmoke]

That was a mod by Ben Heck who used C64 parts and other odds and ends to craft that laptop about 12 years ago. It never was an offering by Commodore but Ben did a terrific job. Commodore's laptop looked more like an electronics oscilloscope with keyboard and was called the SX-64.

The commodore was KILLED by "somebody" purchasing the magazine called "Gazette"...

There was within it the "Commodore Gazette"...

WHAT IS NOW WAS NOT THEN...

the ONLY way that people became aware of "computers" was

a) word of mouth
b) magazines.

The Commodore 64...

AT THAT TIME...

Had MORE COMPUTERS IN HOMES AND BUSINESSES...

than ALL of the other computers COMBINED...that is IBM, TANDY, Apple/Mac had not really made an impact ALL OF THEM...

The "Gazette" spun off a WHOLE OTHER MAGAZINE...

And that magazine had MORE READERS than ALL other magazines about computers and that INCLUDES "PC magazine"...

It all dissapperaed in ONE MONTH...

Because the Commodore was a CANADIAN company that originally made "adding machines"...

I was the president of the second largest commodore club in the U.S. when it happened...

A PERFECT EXAMPLE of ...if one cannot compete with the competition "buy them out"...only this time it was "kill them by chocking off their only air supply".

NOW...

WAS IT EXTENSIBLE like the "modular PC"...um no...BUT...

it was ALMOST THERE with the Commodore CPM which DID have "slots"... for "cards"...

AND THE LIFEBLOOD OF MANUFACTURING...

is providing the latest crappola to feed to the ravening hordes at Best Buy,.

woodaaarrghsmoke

[jpenguin]

Thanks, for all the replies- interesting reads.

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