What are microplastics and what are scientists learning about these small particles? I'm Mia Quinn. On the next episode of Sustainably Speaking, I talk with Dr. Jean Hinkett, who's leading a center that studies microplastics at BASF about how she's approaching this issue with research and solutions in mind. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. So this is how the story came down to me. And I think this is the version that has persisted in popular memory.
In 1980, after years of ignoring the nascent personal computer market, IBM, then the biggest technology company in the world, decides that it wants to create its own personal computer. But because it is so late to the market, IBM is in a rush. It decides to cobble together a computer using components from outside vendors instead of developing everything in-house.
And among the components IBM would need for their computer is an operating system, that basic piece of software that allows the whole machine to run. And so IBM turned to one of the prominent software companies of the time, Microsoft, and asked Microsoft to provide an operating system for what would become the IBM PC. There was only one problem. Microsoft couldn't provide IBM with an operating system because at the time, Microsoft had never actually developed one.
And so Bill Gates tells IBM that it should go pay a visit to Gary Kildall, who had developed and owned far and away the most popular operating system of the time, called CPM. And this is where the story passes into legend. In short order, IBM rolls up to Gary Kildall's house, looking to license CPM as the operating system for the IBM PC. But Gary Kildall isn't home. He's out joy writing in his private plane.
The IBM suits wait around for a while, but start to get impatient waiting for Gary to return. And so instead they try to talk with Gary's wife, Dorothy. But Dorothy, box at IBM's in treaties, especially after the IBM lawyers begin the discussion by pressuring her to sign a draconian non-disclosure agreement. Dorothy refuses to sign the non-disclosure. IBM gets frustrated, and they leave.
IBM goes back to Bill Gates, who suddenly says to them, you know what? Microsoft can do an operating system after all. It turns out that Gates had quickly hustled and purchased a different operating system from a smaller company. And so IBM and Microsoft do a deal. Microsoft produces the operating system for the IBM PC, which is called DOS.
The IBM PC becomes the dominant personal computer in the market, the standard by which all other personal computers were measured, and the reason why to this day we call personal computers PCs. DOS and later Windows becomes the standard computer operating system in the world. Microsoft becomes the most powerful technology company in the world, leaving IBM and other computer hardware makers in the dust, and Bill Gates becomes the richest man in the world.
In short, the way this story came down as legend. Bill Gates became Bill Gates, and Gary Kildall became a footnote in history because the day IBM came calling to do a deal, Gary Kildall was outflying. Over time, as the legend goes, Gary Kildall became embittered by his missed opportunity, spent years railing against Microsoft and Bill Gates, began to suffer from bouts of depression and struggles with alcohol. And in 1994, Gary Kildall died under suspicious circumstances at the age of 52.
Bill Gates' deal with IBM has been called the greatest business deal in the history of the world, and Gary Kildall's failure to land that deal has been called perhaps the greatest business blunder of all time. Part of the reason that this is how the legend has come down to history is because of a quote that Bill Gates later famously gave to the Times of London. When he was responding to questions about how exactly it was he had managed to land the deal with IBM instead of Gary Kildall.
Gates quipped, Gary was outflying when IBM came to meet, and that's why they didn't get the contract. Gary went flying. Those three words are what this legend has been built on. They always say, of course, that it's the winners who tend to write the history books, and so it probably shouldn't surprise you at all to learn that the real details behind this greatest of all technology history urban legends is, shall we say, a bit more complicated.
But the question does remain, could Gary Kildall have become Bill Gates? What really happened almost 40 years ago when IBM came calling and Gary Kildall was outflying? Like Bill Gates, Gary Kildall was a Seattle native. Born 15 years before Gates was, in May of 1942, Gary's father and grandfather before him had been seafaring instructors at the Kildall University of London. He was at the Kildall Notical School.
The intention was very much that Gary would follow in their footsteps in the family business, and indeed in his teenage years, Gary Kildall taught navigation and trigonometry alongside his father. But Gary was more interested in the math than the seafaring. And so in 1964, against his father's wishes, he enrolled at the University of Washington to study mathematics. And it was at the University of Washington that math led Gary Kildall to his true love, computers.
This was the exact moment when computers were transitioning from mechanical to digital machines, from cathode ray tubes to silicon chips. And so for the first time, programming for computers was no longer about flipping switches and feeding punch cards into machines, but was becoming about sitting at a keyboard and typing out digital code.
It was this new type of programming, this ability to manipulate powerful thinking machines with simple digital instructions that really caught Gary Kildall's imagination. He would say about programming, it's fun to sit at a terminal and let the code flow. It sounds strange, but it just comes out of my brain. Once I'm started, I don't have to think about it. Gary would go on to get a doctorate in computer science from the University of Washington.
And later he landed a job teaching math at the U.S. Navy's postgraduate school in Monterey, California, a little over an hour's drive south of Silicon Valley. He continued to explore his passion for computers in his spare time though. And in 1972, a colleague showed Kildall an ad in electronic engineering times for Intel's 4004 chip, the first microprocessor made by Intel. In essence, it was an entire computer on one single piece of silicon.
Kildall procured a 4004 chip for himself and recognized its importance right away. This was a very primitive computer by anyone's standards, but it foretold the possibility of one's own personal computer that need not be shared by anyone else. It may be hard to believe that this little processor started the whole damn industry.
Just like hundreds of hobbyists around the world were beginning to do at exactly this period in time, in the early 1970s, Kildall coupled together an entire computer system based on this new chip, using parts he pieced together himself, and resulting in a machine about the size of a briefcase. It was very probably one of the world's first personal computers, but it was not commercially available. It was Kildall's own toy.
Gary Kildall took his toy, this briefcase computer, around to all in sundry, giving demos of what the 4004 chip could do. And among those who were impressed by Kildall's demos was Intel itself, which hired Kildall as a part-time consultant to its nascent software group. Software was such a low priority at Intel at the time that the software group consisted of two people plus Gary.
Based on an idea that a fellow Intel engineer Stan Mazer had, in 1972, Gary Kildall programmed one of the world's first computer games on this briefcase computer. And one day, legendary Intel co-founder Bob Nois was walking by the software team and was given a demonstration of Kildall's computer game. Nois was not really that impressed. Nois peered at the LEDs blinking away in my 4004. He looked at Stan and me and said bluntly that the future is in digital watches, not computer games.
But it was thanks to his consultancy at Intel that, again, Gary Kildall would get a chance to glimpse the future. Intel was developing and would soon release follow-ups to the 4004 chip, which were more sophisticated and 10 times faster. Kildall, of course, wanted to tinker around again and see what these new chips could do. And this time, he wanted to see if he could store data on his cobbled together improvised computers.
And that would mean hooking them up to a disk drive. And so, on his own initiative, and all by his lonesome, he wrote the world's first disk operating system for a micro computer. He called it CPM. The name stood for Control Program for Microcomputers.
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Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com. That's three free boards at miro.com. So we should point out here, Bill Gates did not invent the operating system for personal computers. Gary Kildall did. And he did so before personal computers were really even invented. The first really commercially available personal computers would not come out for another couple of years.
But Gary Kildall anticipated them before they even arrived. And what's more, Gary Kildall's operating system was designed to work with any of the forthcoming Intel microprocessors. Especially the 808 and the 8800. And that's important because many of the first personal computers would be based on these Intel chips.
And so since Gary Kildall's CPM operating system worked on all of these new chips, that meant that going forward, programmers wouldn't have to develop applications tailored to individual machines. A programmer could simply write an application that worked with CPM, and that application would work on any computer that used CPM and Intel chips. Gary Kildall's friend and future business partner Tom Rollender will play a major role in this story later on, by the way.
Points out why this little innovation was so important, saying, quote, think of how horrible it was for the software vendors before that time. They would have to have different copies of their programs configured to different pieces of hardware. And there were scores of specialized pieces of hardware. Imagine a world where each model of car required a different kind of gasoline. That is what it was like for computer operators before Kildall's innovations.
The historian Harold Evans is even more pointed in explaining why this was such a breakthrough saying, quote, this was the genesis of the whole third party software industry. I want to talk about the sorts of companies that tiny tends to buy this week. So let's start with the bootstrap companies.
You've scaled your business with real customers and revenue. It's profitable to the tune of like $500,000 a year or so. But you're burnt out and don't know how to take it to the next level, or maybe you just want to do something new. But you know, you don't want to just walk away. That's a profitable company there. The only problem is it's just not quite big enough to be acquired to get on the radar of venture capital.
And let's face it, internet businesses aren't like a restaurant or something that you can just turn key sell. Traditional buyers sometimes can't wrap their minds around internet businesses. Well, that's exactly the kind of market niche that tiny is trying to fill. Tiny is building a small button mighty holding company of sorts that collects profitable web and internet businesses and pulls them together to keep them all running and doing what they do best.
Tiny likes simple internet businesses that have high margins don't require tons of people or complex technology and are just, you know, exactly the right size for what they do. No unicorn envy here. If this sounds like you give tiny a visit at tiny.website, that's tiny.website and when you get in touch, well, you know what to do. The Altair 8800 is generally regarded as the first widely commercially available personal computer.
The Altair was basically the computer that kick started the personal computer industry. It came out in 1975 and it was based on the Intel 8800 chip, one of those successors to the 808 chips. The Altair did not use Gary Kildall's CPM operating system, but the very popular MSI 8800, a clone of the Altair did. MSI licensed CPM from Gary Kildall for $25,000 until had declined to purchase or commercialize Kildall's operating system, not seeing the utility of it.
And so Kildall was free to shop his operating system around to anyone who wanted to use it. And it was on the basis of early licensees like the MSI 8800 that Gary Kildall decided to go into business. Actually, he was talked into becoming a businessman by his wife, Dorothy. Both friends and contemporaries claim that Gary Kildall just had no interest in business matters generally.
He was perhaps a programmer first and an academic second. It was the invention, the tinkering around on the thing that interested him, not the business end of it. And even after his tinkering led to licensing agreements here and there for real money, he was reluctant to make an actual business out of his tinkering.
And so, Dorothy volunteered herself as the business manager for a new company that the couple would incorporate as intergalactic digital research, later shortened just to digital research. Dorothy was very much the key catalyst for turning Gary Kildall into a proper businessman and turning digital research into a proper business enterprise.
She was so focused on people taking the company seriously in fact that she began to use her maiden name professionally so that digital research wouldn't look like such a mom and pop operation. But in short order, digital research was decidedly not a mom and pop operation. By 1978, digital research sales would reach $100,000 a month with 57% profit margins.
By 1980, digital research would have sold perhaps half a million copies of CPM at about $100 a pop. By this point, digital research was one of the most prominent players in an embryonic software industry that had sprung up to service the explosion in personal computers that was happening in the late 1970s. Digital research grew to several dozen full time employees.
And when the company got a booth at Comdex, the annual computer show in Las Vegas, digital research varied potential clients around in limos. Gary Kildall could suddenly afford the toys that he would enjoy his whole life, speedboats, formula one race cars, nice houses, and those private planes that he liked to fly around and to get to business meetings. It was CPM, the operating system that made digital research and the Kildalls very rich.
So many of the dozens of tiny personal computer manufacturers that sprung up in the wake of the Altair turned to CPM as their operating system of choice. In short, digital research was the Microsoft of personal computers in the late 1970s. Through its CPM operating system, digital research created the software platform on which most of the young PC industry ran. CPM was the DOS Windows of the 1970s and Gary Kildall was that era's Bill Gates. But what of the real Bill Gates?
It turns out that as much as any other software developer of the time, he was indeed a fan of Gary Kildall and CPM. The company that would become Microsoft got its start in Albuquerque, New Mexico, creating programming languages for the Altair 8800 machines and then for other computer companies that sprung up in the wake.
If an operating system was necessary for any early PC, just so that you could make the machine run, then programming languages were just as necessary in order to enable the hobbyists who were the earliest computer adopters to do what they wanted to do on these early machines. And that was tinker around and write their own programs and applications. And so Microsoft became the biggest all-purpose purveyor of these languages, especially basic but also Fortran, Pascal and Koball.
Microsoft sold to every computer maker they could sell to. In those early days, in fact, Microsoft was the biggest software vendor on Apple computers. But all of Microsoft's programming languages had to be tweaked slightly to work with various machines. And so, again, this is why Bill Gates was such a big fan of Gary Kildall and CPM. Because it meant that Microsoft only had to write a program once for machines that ran on CPM.
Microsoft became the king of the programming languages partially by tying itself closely to CPM, the king of the operating systems. Steve Wood, who is a programmer and one of the first dozen or so Microsoft employees, would remember that early on, Microsoft even made a habit of steering customers towards CPM. Because quote, it made our lives a lot easier if someone would just go license CPM and get that on their machines. And then our stuff would pretty much run as is.
And apparently, Gary Kildall would do likewise steering digital research customers towards Microsoft if they were in need of languages. Again, Steve Wood remembers quote, if someone went to him to license CPM and they were looking for languages, he would refer people to Microsoft. It was a very synergistic kind of thing. Cinergistic indeed. Between the two of them, Gary Kildall and Bill Gates supplied a large part of the software that early personal computer users needed.
At least until productivity programs like spreadsheets and word processors hit the market in the early 1980s. And in fact, Gary Kildall and Bill Gates went back a long way. As Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out so famously when Bill Gates was busy racking up his 10,000 hours of learning to program computers as a kid, he did so hanging out in his spare time at the computer center corporation in Seattle in the computer science center at the University of Washington.
This was at the exact same time that Gary Kildall was a graduate student pursuing his PhD research in that exact same computer science center. And so he knew Bill Gates back then as a exuberant young teenager who competed for time on the center's time share mainframes with older graduate students like himself.
By 1978 Kildall and Gates, despite their age differences, found themselves in similar situations, founders of suddenly successful software companies, writing the turbulent birth of the personal computer industry, and coincidentally locked in a symbiotic, if unplanned, embrace where one company supplied the operating system and the other provided the software languages. And it was around this time that Bill Gates paid a visit to Gary Kildall to introduce himself.
Kildall remembered the visit years later. We invited him to stay that night at our home, Dorothy fixed a nice roast chicken dinner. It was apparently at this meeting that Gates broached the subject of some sort of a digital research Microsoft merger, something that would certainly seem logical because it would put all of the most popular personal computer software at the time under one corporate umbrella. It was a fairly serious discussion.
I thought it was an okay idea, but we weren't able to come to any final agreement. I don't know how our personalities would have mixed. I got along fine with him, but we would have had to explore it more. Years later, Gary Kildall would record other reasons why he was reticent to get in bed with Bill Gates. For some reason, I've always felt uneasy around Bill. I always kept my hand on my wallet and the other on my program listings.
I found his manner too abrasive and deterministic, although he mostly carried a smile through a discussion of any sort. Gates is more of an opportunist than a technical type. But there were other considerations as well. For one thing, the current state of affairs was working out quite well. Thank you very much, at least from Gary Kildall's point of view.
As Kildall would later recall to the writer James Wallace, there was an agreement in principle that Microsoft would do languages and we would do the operating systems. But that was only because at the time we were doing operating systems and they were doing languages. Wasn't like we had divvied up the marketplace. Feeling like you need a marketing degree in an extra day in your week to successfully market your small business, let constant contact do the heavy lifting for you.
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Set in the near future, a Better Paradise tells the story of the ill-fated development of an ambitious but addictive digital game world project led by inventor and psychologist Dr. Mark Tyburn. As the advanced software they developed began delivering unexpected and disturbing results. The team fell apart under strange circumstances and the project was abandoned. The game world and the superintelligence within were discarded, left dormant, and undiscovered.
Until now, a Better Paradise features an all-star cast including Andrew Lincoln of the Walking Dead, Shamir Anderson from John Wick 4 and Invasion, Patterson Joseph from Wanka and Rain Spencer from the summer I turned pretty. A Better Paradise is created and written by Dan Hauser, the co-founder of Rockstar Games, A Better Paradise is out now and available everywhere you get your podcasts.
Go listen today and don't forget to follow a Better Paradise on your platform of choice to make sure you never miss an episode. Because Gary Kildall had very specific ideas about competition in a software marketplace. He would warn his employees that if an owner of a popular operating system decided to get into an silvery software market, like say productivity applications, then there was potential for unpleasant monopolistic practices to spring up.
Gary Kildall had a philosophical aversion to using his popular operating system platform to extend and then dominate other sectors of the marketplace. A reticence for competition that, of course, Bill Gates would not share in the years to come. And so this brings us to the fateful year of 1980. Gary Kildall's digital research is the King of the Operating System and Bill Gates's Microsoft is the King of the Software Languages. Gary Kildall is 38 years old in 1980. Bill Gates is all of 25.
At this point, Gary Kildall is probably a bit more influential in the industry and maybe even a bit wealthier as well. But both of these men had ridden the same wave at the dawn of the PC industry to great success. The birth of the PC industry was very much the story of hobbyists sort of accidentally turning their hobbies into an industry. The first PC companies were started in garages, in basements, the fruit of the labor of a generation of tinkers and geeks.
But one by one, these tiny hobbyist concerns turned into major enterprises. Tandy, Commodore, and especially Apple, which coincidentally had its own famous IPO in 1980, showed that personal computers were a big deal, a major market for the future.
And so, for many years, observers of this young upstart market wondered when the big boys, the decades-old computer manufacturers like Univac, Honeywell, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and especially IBM, would wake up to this new market for PCs and try to get a piece of the pie. IBM was by far the biggest of the bunch. For decades, the largest company in all of technology. IBM's calculating machines helped win World War II. Its computers helped NASA put a man on the moon.
And in the 1960s, IBM was selling 70% of the computers in the world. By the 1980s, IBM had revenues of $28 billion a year. Its stock was one of the widest held in the world. But it was also the classic incumbent, ripe for disruption from below. IBM is known as Big Blue because of the company's once-famous dress code of crisp white shirts and navy suits that it enforced for its salesman.
IBM was the epitome of Fortune 500 traditionalism. It had almost nothing in common with the shaggy-haired hobbyists who had created the new personal computer industry. Like many classic stories of incumbents disrupted from below, IBM chose to ignore the personal computer market at first. It simply didn't take the market seriously. And so it took a group of Mavericks within the monolithic company to force through the creation of a PC project as a sort of under the radar skunkworks project.
This project for a IBM PC was even started in and out of the way place in Boca Ratan, Florida. The hope among the IBM Mavericks was that they could somehow scratch together a model and bring it to market before the corporate bigwigs at headquarters could get cold feet and cancel the project. Plus, as Don Estridge, one of the IBM Mavericks remarked later, quote,
If you're competing against people who started in a garage, you have to start in a garage. More importantly, the Mavericks at IBM like Estridge knew that they were late to the party. They were chasing especially Apple, which at the time looked like it was beginning to run away with the young PC market. And so, for the sake of expediency, IBM broke with longstanding corporate tradition and decided that it didn't have time to completely design its PC in-house.
There was initially some talk of buying an existing computer and merely slapping IBM's name on it, but in the end the decision was made to literally take components that already existed from outside vendors and create their crash course computer in that way. A company in Taiwan was selected to provide the monitor, Epson would provide the printer, Intel would provide the microprocessor, and when it came time for software, IBM again decided that it would simply shop off the shelf.
And this is why, beginning in July and August of 1980, Big Blue came to talk to Bill Gates. Gates and his then Ragtag team of Microsoft programmers certainly fit the shaggy-haired image of the pseudo-hippy culture of the early personal computer industry. Suits and ties were definitely not common in Microsoft offices in those days. Even shoes were not necessarily a required part of the dress code.
25-year-old Bill Gates was famous, actually, for wearing the same clothes days at a time, seldom bothering even to shave or to comb his hair and occasionally, infamously, going maybe a week at a time without showering. But when he got the call that IBM was coming to town, Bill Gates dropped everything on his schedule, dropped everything on Microsoft's plate, and told his employees it was time to break out the suits and the ties.
This anecdote about putting on suits to try to impress Big Blue with their wingtip shoes and slipped back hair is something that is told over and over again in every recounting of this story. In fact, here's no less than Steve Balmer's version of events from the documentary Triumph of the Nerds. Bill said to all of us next week and they said, we're on an airplane, we're leaving it in an hour, we'd like to be there tomorrow. Well, I'll let you, right off.
And Bill said, Steve, you better come to the meeting, you're the only other guy here who can wear a suit. So we figured, okay, the two of us will put on suits, we'll put on suits, and we'll go to this meeting. Part of what this anecdote shows is that Bill Gates was eager to prove to IBM what IBM was trying to prove to itself that this young scrappy PC market could clean up well and actually turn out to be a big deal.
But it also shows that Bill Gates, who was all of 25 at the time you'll remember, was eager to show that he himself could do business with the big boys as well. Another famous anecdote holds that when the IBM guys showed up at Microsoft, they at first mistook Bill Gates for the office intern. Here is Jack Sam's who headed the IBM delegation to Microsoft, recalling that particular story again from the triumph of the nerds documentary.
We got there roughly to a clock and we're waiting in the front and Sean fellow came out to take us back to Mr. Gates office. I thought he was the office boy. And of course it was Bill. Bill Gates idolized IBM in much the same way that Steve Jobs idolized Sony. It was the personification of what Gates thought of as the ideal technology company. IBM was the sort of company that Bill Gates wanted Microsoft to become someday.
Many biographies of Bill Gates maintained that the book he read more than any other was the IBM way by Thomas Watson Sr. the man who made IBM into the computing colossus of the 20th century. And so what this Sutant-Tie anecdote shows is that contrary to Gary Kildall, what Bill Gates wanted more than anything else was to be a big time businessman, just like his idols at IBM.
But what the anecdote also reflects is Bill Gates is a neat entrepreneurial genius for identifying and then seizing a business opportunity in this case what he immediately saw as the biggest business opportunity of his life. Another detail that is repeated over and over about the IBM meeting is that Bill Gates canceled all his other business when IBM showed up even previously scheduled meetings with pre-existing major business partners such as Atari.
He did this because he intuited that IBM coming to the PC market would be a game changer. Sure, Atari was big in the existing PC market, but big blue was big blue. It had the power to change the PC market to transform it into something else entirely. IBM was trusted throughout the Mahogany offices of corporate America at the time.
If the PC market in 1980 was about hobbyists and early adopters, Gates saw that IBM could create a market that put computers into every office and into every Fortune 500 company on the planet. The famous line has always been that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. Bill Gates had created Microsoft by tying it to the biggest platform of the early PC era, which was Gary Kildall's CPM. But now, he saw that IBM represented an entirely new and an entirely larger paradigm.
And from this very first moment, it seems that Bill Gates decided again to tie himself to that new paradigm. Tie Microsoft's fortunes to IBMs, a strategy that Microsoft would continue to great success for more than a decade. And so, when IBM showed up to meet with Bill Gates, he bent over backwards to be accommodating. His intention was to give IBM literally anything it asked for, do anything he could do to create a business partnership that would last.
When IBM demanded that before uttering word one, he signed its infamous non-disclosure agreement. An agreement so intimidating and one-sided that it forbade Gates from even acknowledging that the meeting was taking place. That said, if he acted on any of the information IBM revealed, he would be sued into oblivion, but that, conversely, IBM could use any secrets about Microsoft that were revealed, and he would have no recourse, Gates signed the non-disclosure without even thinking twice.
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Sign up for Greenlight today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com slash ride. That's greenlight.com slash ride to try Greenlight for free. Greenlight.com slash ride. And so, IBM told Bill Gates, quote, This is the most unusual thing this corporation has ever done. As Gates, of course, suspected, IBM was developing its own personal computer. And as Gates was fervently hoping, IBM wanted Microsoft to provide software development tools for the new PC.
Tools like the programming language is basic for Trana and Pascal. This was exactly what Microsoft was good at, of course. Microsoft was the king of the software languages. But there was one more thing. IBM also needed an operating system. They knew that all of these languages Microsoft made ran on an operating system called CPM. So IBM was hoping that Microsoft would be able to provide it with a version of CPM as well.
Well, again, above all, Bill Gates at this moment doesn't want to say no to IBM. If they ask him to jump, he will say how high. If they ask him to provide something that he doesn't have in this case, an operating system, there's no way that Bill Gates is going to let them go away empty handed. Bill Gates will be accommodating to IBM. He will help them find their operating system.
Again, from the triumph of the nerds documentary, here's how it all went down according to Steve Balmer and Jack Sam's. Sam's again was the head of the IBM delegation. They thought we had an operating system because we had this soft card product that had CPM on it. They thought we could life in some CPM for this new personal computer they told us they wanted to do and we said, well, no, we're not in that business.
And when we discovered we didn't have the heated and other rights to do that and that it was not. He said, but I think it's ready. I think Gary's got to go. Well, no, but no time like the president called Gary. So Bill right there with them in the room called Gary Kildall digital research said, Gary, I'm sending some guys down. They're going to be on the phone. Treat them right. They're important guys.
Here are some other quotes from Jack Sam's this time from the book hard drive Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft empire. I presume they were able to offer us a 16 bit version of the operating system, but we really didn't discover until the second or third meeting that that was not true because we weren't able at the first meeting to ask the sort of detailed questions we wanted to ask.
Bill told us if we wanted a 16 bit CPM, we would have to deal with Kildall. We said, oops, we had really only wanted to deal with one person, but now we had to talk to Kildall. I asked Bill Gates if he would make an appointment for us. Every version of this story has Bill Gates personally picking up the phone calling Gary Kildall and telling him he's sending some business his way.
But remember, Gates has just signed this notorious confidentiality agreement. And so he can't reveal exactly who it is he's sending over. He can't reveal to Gary Kildall that it's IBM. So every recollection of this incident has Gates merely relating some version of there's some very important customers coming to talk to you. Treat them right.