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Before Big Blue

If you were in the market for a personal computer back in 1980, you had plenty of choices. Many popular models of the day ran an operating system from Digital Research called CP/M. Commodore's PET and Tandy/Radio Shack's TRS-80 were also established players. And two guys named Steve had a big business selling the Apple II.

Those systems were aimed at hobbyists who liked to write programs in the BASIC programming language. The major supplier of BASIC was Microsoft, a little company in Bellevue, Washington, headed by a Harvard dropout named Bill Gates.

IBM, the biggest name in serious--that is to say, large and business-oriented--computers, took notice of the nascent personal computer industry in 1980 and assigned a veteran manager/engineer named Don Estridge to get an IBM PC to market. Under strict deadline pressure, IBM engineers in Boca Raton, Florida, made decisions that are still with us today.

For instance, David Bradley, who was a member of Estridge's engineering team, recalls, "The system would hang, and the only way you could fix it was to turn it off. So I built a warm reboot into the keyboard code. I invented Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but Bill Gates made it famous."

The tight deadline meant that the system had to be built with existing technology. Its central processing unit was Intel's 8088. The 8088 was a 16-bit chip--a zippier, more powerful CPU than the 8-bit CPUs used by most early microcomputers. But to keep costs down, the 8088 talked to other components via an 8-bit bus.

Why didn't IBM stick with the popular CP/M operating system? Legend has it that Digital Research president Gary Kildall skipped a meeting with IBM execs to go flying or hang gliding. A more likely story is that Digital Research refused to sign IBM's nondisclosure agreement.