MS-DOS, every mention
65 scenes · ← back to MS-DOS
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 33Ben Gilbert 25Steve Ballmer 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where MS-DOS comes up
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 8:06 Ben Gilbert Before the IBM PC and before DOS, can you catch listeners up who weren't around at that time?
- ▶ 11:54 Ben Gilbert And so the licensing of Microsoft DOS, which didn't even exist when IBM approached you about licensing some things, is the single greatest business deal in history.
- ▶ 15:16 Ben Gilbert But what ended up happening after all these years, and I imagine it only took a few years to see it play out, was IBM sold a ton of IBM PCs, and DOS was the operating system.
- ▶ 15:30 Ben Gilbert And then everybody else adopted DOS because all the application makers, all the software vendors, were targeting DOS as the platform, and so Microsoft sort of accrued a huge amount of benefit.
- ▶ 16:43 Steve Ballmer There were plenty of people who ran MS-DOS who were actually not IBM compatible because they didn't do a compatible BIOS.
- ▶ 19:45 Ben Gilbert You end up shipping DOS.
- ▶ 31:49 David Rosenthal Not DOS.
- ▶ 31:50 Steve Ballmer Not DOS.
- ▶ 31:51 Steve Ballmer DOS was always sold to OEM.
- ▶ 33:53 Steve Ballmer And, you know, we had DOS and windows and whenever talking to Cutler about coming here, he says, I don't want to work any toy operating systems.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 50:01 David Rosenthal And to that point, there is no DOS yet.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 34:14 David Rosenthal It sounds like reality is a lot like the DOS acquisition.
- ▶ 34:26 David Rosenthal Was that the same thing as Microsoft DOS?
- ▶ 2:04:25 Ben Gilbert During the DOS era, Microsoft's productivity apps did not get real adoption in DOS, which is crazy.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:44:46 David Rosenthal And thus, DOS is born.
- ▶ 1:44:49 Ben Gilbert Which, of course, later, they would drop the queue and call it DOS, the Disk Operating System.
- ▶ 1:45:38 David Rosenthal And so he, with the rest of the team, he's part of building DOS, taking his initial work and turning it into real DOS.
- ▶ 1:46:08 David Rosenthal This is DOS.
- ▶ 1:46:10 David Rosenthal Now, look, one programmer wrote a quote, quick and dirty operating system, and Microsoft bought the license to that and adapted it into DOS.
- ▶ 1:46:21 David Rosenthal Seattle Computer Products definitely did not write DOS as DOS becomes.
- ▶ 1:46:25 David Rosenthal It's not like Microsoft bought all of DOS for 75,000 dollars.
- ▶ 1:46:33 Ben Gilbert So, Microsoft would eventually generate billions of dollars on DOS-based products.
- ▶ 1:46:51 Ben Gilbert But my God, 75,000 dollars to buy DOS to get this whole thing started for, I mean, until Windows 95, all of the Windows operating systems were DOS based.
- ▶ 1:47:58 David Rosenthal Okay, so now they've got the operating system, they've got QDOS, or DOS, in place to license to IBM.
- ▶ 1:48:54 Ben Gilbert 45,000 dollars for DOS.
- ▶ 1:49:18 David Rosenthal Every copy of DOS that IBM sells, either included as part of systems that they're selling, or they're free to charge independently for DOS, whatever amount they want, Microsoft gets zero dollars.
- ▶ 1:50:12 David Rosenthal To own DOS and to own their languages and license it and them to anyone else they wanted at any price on any terms.
- ▶ 1:55:36 David Rosenthal Now, before we talk about the clones, this is really just a footnote because, of course, all the incentives are aligned for IBM to push DOS as the operating system for the PC.
- ▶ 1:56:03 David Rosenthal They don't have to go with DOS.
- ▶ 1:56:05 David Rosenthal Consumers can choose between DOS, sixteen-bit CPM.
- ▶ 1:56:37 David Rosenthal And DOS, which was developed specifically for the PC, is the best way to run it, is only 60 dollars.
- ▶ 1:56:49 David Rosenthal Their hardware for the PC by selling DOS, because they don't have to pay Microsoft any of that, and they've set up the incentives that, like, obviously everybody's gonna choose DOS.
- ▶ 1:57:09 Ben Gilbert One is, we're simplifying and calling it DOS.
- ▶ 1:57:11 Ben Gilbert It was PC-DOS, which is different than MS-DOS, which would get licensed to other computer makers.
- ▶ 2:01:10 David Rosenthal But yeah, Compaq, all these other clone companies that get started, Microsoft licenses DOS to all of them, importantly, critically, on a per machine sold basis.
- ▶ 2:19:43 Ben Gilbert No, these are DOS applications.
- ▶ 2:30:39 unnamed speaker Microsoft Word comes out for DOS.
- ▶ 2:30:54 unnamed speaker We're gonna do that for DOS.
- ▶ 2:31:00 unnamed speaker So they actually ship a mouse tied to the application that's not a part of DOS.
- ▶ 2:32:15 Ben Gilbert You're starting to see truly divergent cultures at Microsoft between the systems group, which is currently making DOS and will soon make windows or soon partner with IBM or soon do something else that we're getting into here in the next…
- ▶ 2:34:32 David Rosenthal You know, Lotus and the world back in the command line interface where you've got these programs running on top of DOS, that is like a completely foreign concept.
- ▶ 2:39:47 David Rosenthal It's just a graphical interface on top of DOS.
- ▶ 2:39:56 Ben Gilbert In all of their early marketing, they referred to it as Windows, a graphical operating environment that runs on the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system.
- ▶ 2:40:26 Ben Gilbert Obviously here, Microsoft knows they need to evolve DOS.
- ▶ 2:41:47 David Rosenthal This was bad, and so IBM wants to find a way to evolve the PC ecosystem back to being more IBM proprietary, and they're gonna make Microsoft come along for the ride here, and the way that they're gonna do this is with the next generation…
- ▶ 2:43:18 Ben Gilbert This is such a crazy part of the story to me because we just talked about how Microsoft discovered this amazing business model and with everyone needing to license DOS from them, they're taking over the world and they're becoming the…
- ▶ 2:47:54 Ben Gilbert I mean, DOS and the applications were both great businesses by 87.
- ▶ 2:48:56 David Rosenthal Open PC ecosystem that you can have a really good, true multitasking, good UI, graphical user interface running on top of DOS.
- ▶ 2:49:08 David Rosenthal So, Windows one point O and Windows two point O only ever achieved five percent penetration of the DOS installed base.
- ▶ 2:49:58 David Rosenthal It accommodates existing DOS applications, and it makes you believe that it belongs on a PC.
- ▶ 2:58:13 David Rosenthal Because developers were targeting DOS at this point.
- ▶ 2:58:33 Ben Gilbert At this point, they were still installing DOS, or some people were actually installing nothing and requiring users to put operating systems on.
- ▶ 2:59:13 David Rosenthal You could pay us, you know, a license fee for every machine you ship with DOS installed on it, or DOS and Windows.
- ▶ 2:59:27 David Rosenthal We'll give you a cheaper per unit deal, because you're gonna ship DOS on everything.
- ▶ 2:59:31 David Rosenthal DOS is the standard, and we want Windows to be the standard, and Windows is gonna be the standard.
- ▶ 2:59:35 David Rosenthal We'll make it more economically attractive to you, give you a lower per unit rate, if we just kind of change the terms and say, instead of every unit you ship with DOS or with Windows, every machine you ship, period.
- ▶ 2:59:58 David Rosenthal So if you do that, you'll be paying us for every machine, whether you ship DOS or Windows on it or not, but you're gonna ship DOS and Windows anyway.
- ▶ 3:00:51 Ben Gilbert What machines they shipped DOS on or Windows on versus what machines they shipped period.
- ▶ 3:01:19 David Rosenthal The winners.
- ▶ 3:11:25 Ben Gilbert They've got DOS and early windows, which is essentially consumer targeted, but now they've got this guy, Dave.
- ▶ 3:28:11 Ben Gilbert If you try to look this up, it will tell you Windows 95 was DOS based.
- ▶ 3:28:15 Ben Gilbert It still used DOS in fallback situations for older DOS applications or drivers, but for most of the time, it was no longer true that Windows was just an operating environment on top of the DOS operating system.
- ▶ 4:02:44 David Rosenthal DOS.
- ▶ 4:02:53 Ben Gilbert IBM's distribution created demand for DOS, and then Microsoft just got to capture value from everyone else who wanted it.
Standard Oil Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 1:27:23 Ben Gilbert It might've been DOS.