Thread by @trengriffin

1/ A source of leverage for some people is the company they join as an employee if they are granted stock options.

Imagine you joined Microsoft in December of 1979. Year-end sales and were $2.5 million and you were the 26th employee. The company sells BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN.

2/ Bill Gates:​ "When IBM first visited us [in the summer 1980] it was actually a small group from IBM's Boca Raton laboratory. They had spare capacity and the Board had asked them to do something sort of quickly, in a lean sort of way... an experiment." threadreaderapp.com/thread/1193294…

3/ Many people who write about the IBM PC's birth have negative information on what actually happened. They rely on sources like unauthorized biographies. By December 1980 the number of companies having 40 developers who could write software for PCs was exactly one: Microsoft.

4/ If someone claims they are knowledgeable about the history of the IBM PC, ask them how many operating systems were sold by IBM when it first shipped.

"IBM sold the UCSD Pascal P-system for about $450, CP/M-86 for about $175, and MS-DOS for about $60."

Which sold best?

5/ Paul Allen: “IBM paid Microsoft $75k for testing, and consultation; $45k for DOS; and $310k for an array of 16-bit language interpreters and compilers. Bill and I were willing to forgo per-copy royalties if we could freely license the DOS software to other manufacturers."

6/ Bill Gates: “Our goal was not to make money directly from IBM, but to profit from licensing MS-DOS to computer companies that wanted to offer machines compatible with the IBM PC.”

"We knew from the beginning we weren’t the BASIC company. We were a software company."

7/ Some of the fake stories about Microsoft started in 1990 when two big publishers announced that biographies would be written about Bill. I was part of a team which included Bill and Melissa Waggener that thought about the right response. Not cooperating was the easy decision.

8/ The hard decision in 1990 was whether Bill would write an autobiography to preempt the unauthorized books. As part of the analysis I wrote a book proposal which I still have (pic attached). In the end Bill said he had more far important work to do than write an autobiography.