>>>>can somebody tell me if Bill Gates has cut ALL ties to Micosoft and now has nothing to do with Microsoft. I'm just curious and a little confused.
>>>
>>>He recently handed off the day-to-day operational responsibility to Steve Ballmer and appointed himself Microsoft's "chief software architect".
>>
>>< g > sure sounds like to me that he's tired of being in the hot seat and wants to revert back to true geekhood & become a code monkey again. Considering the dark sordid History of MS DOS which was from him past code monkey life, I think the only folks that should be concerned here are the hot seat sitters at companies like Sybase & SAP. ( LOL! )
>
>Actually, Bill Gates bought DOS for $500 or some rediculasly low figure like that.

BOb,

Fifty thousand actually. From a company named Seattle Computing. Apparently there was some sort of dispute and the company didn't get paid for a while.

The O/S was essentially a port of CP/M from the Z80 chip set to the 8080 (might have even been the 4040) chip set. The source for CP/M was "out there" for anyone who knew anyone, though I'm sure Gary Kildall wasn't too happy about it. *g* The first version was REALLY UGLY and had fewer features than CP/M, particularly one of the variant versions like ..uh.. oh dear, I can't seem to remember.... ZCPR3 out of Davis, California. The CP/M O/S was built in 3 parts and one of them was open to all so a lot of folks made changes/enhancements.

If I remember correctly they were:

1. The core/kernal
2. The Hardware device interface
3. The TPA stuff where most of the UI enhancements went.

CP/M was the first truly universal O/S but was plagued with different diskette drive formats. The way to communicate was through a built-in program called PIP or Peripherial Interchange Program. Then came the program called MODEM (bastardized as he wrote to me later into MODEM7 - but it was a better program *g*), written by Ward Christansen, followed closely by online BBS's and the rest of the online community followed shortly thereafter.

Those are the roots of today's Universal Thread if anyone wants to know.

Best,

DD