IBM doesn't use Microsoft's DOS

1. How does it happen?
2. What do they use instead? (likely candidate would be CP/M)
3. What happens to Microsoft?
4. What happens to the computer industry and market at large?
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
I've often wondered why they just didn't go ahead and make up one of their own. It's always seemed rather silly to me, "here's this machine, you have to put in your own controls."

And wouldn't that make the OS a part of the machine for regulatory purposes? you can't fault Ford just because they want to make all their own engines.

Microsoft makes several millions on an Office Suite. Bill Gates becomes the Halo III World Champion and marries Morgan Webb who he meets at a convention. They have 3 children and live in Seattle. :p

Everybody uses Linux.
 
1. How does it happen?

Most likely Digital Research gets CP/M-86 out sooner. Possibly if Kildall didn't take a day off to go flying instead of speaking with IBM...

2. What do they use instead? (likely candidate would be CP/M)

The other OSes offered for early IBM PCs were CP/M-86 and the UCSD p-System (Pascal-based; most notably used on IBM's other personal computer of the era, the DisplayWriter "word processor"). Most likely CP/M-86 is successful. Microsoft may actually enter the market later; they already marketed a UNIX-based OS called XENIX, and in ~1983 or so offered it for PCs in OTL.

3. What happens to Microsoft?

They don't quite become the market force of OTL, but they do make decent business selling BASIC for the IBM PC and for a lot of other companies.

4. What happens to the computer industry and market at large?

Short-term, things aren't that different. People bought IBM PCs because of the good hardware and the IBM name, and in any case CP/M-86 and MS-DOS 1.0 are very similar. Either DR will develop the OS further (in which case Digital Research may become the "Microsoft" behemoth), or some other player will later push them aside. Possibly UNIX-based (such as Microsoft XENIX or Coherent), or a new GUI OS.

There may be big butterflies regarding MSX computers. MSX-DOS was sort of an 8-bit MS-DOS-like OS. I don't know if Microsoft will still develop MSX without the IBM PC. If so, the OS may have differences from OTL.

If DR becomes the big company and perseveres, then we see CP/M-86/DR-DOS as the dominant OS, flowing into a GUI system based on GEM, and a somewhat like OTL computer market with DR instead of MS. Microsoft will probably resemble OTL Borland, a company selling mostly development software and office packages (except MS had XENIX, and the Softcard - a card that allowed Apple IIs to use CP/M; MS might, like OTL, branch out into making peripherals). With Kildall instead of Gates, Digital Research might not go for being a monopoly in everything and instead focusing in on dominating the operating system market plus maybe development software and a few other specific fields.
 
Been done in the book "Almost America" by Steve Talley.

Microsoft is bought out by Apple, who then hires Bill Gates to be their Spokesman. Due to Gates' business savvy (not to mention vendetta against IBM) Apple goes on to become the largest and most profitable company in the world. Big blue falls hard, just like IOTL.
 

hammo1j

Donor
Whatever the TL, Gates is still going to feature big. A friend who worked for Microsoft Security for a time met the great man. How did he describe him? "Brilliant. He even had an excellent grasp of the relatively obscure and novel area I was investigating."

So despite the criticisms ranged at Gates and MS of monopoly and plagiarism, it still took a great man to achieve what Gates did.

The upshot is that the IBM PC MS/DOS was a Great Step Backwards in that the 8086 processor was rubbish in comparison to the 68000 and MSDOS was a single tasking OS with no crash protection. Ideally for world computing the winner could have been something like a skinny Digital VMS (like Unix but much, much better) running on a 68000. So we can conclude that the IBM pc might get a better OS without Microsoft. Again it was so poor that I often wonder if IBM deliberately stunted it to protect its other lucrative lines.

Certainly the reasons for its success were nothing to do with MS.DOS so we can see things happening as in the original OTL with another vendor having the opportunity to do a Microsoft but probably not as people like Gates and Jobs etc are the exception rather than the rule.

Microshaft will go on and become a big software supplier, but without control of the OS not the dominant supplier. There will be proper competition in the marketplace, spurring innovation so you would expect Lotus, Borland, Microsoft etc etc to be still continuing the fight that they had before MS crushed allcomers in the early 90s.

On the otherhand it will be harder for users since the Sovietisation of Office software will not have occurred and the poor users will have to master a plethora of packages and not just MS Office!
 
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The main reason Microsoft operating systems became dominant was that they gave away their development packs for free, whereas the dev pack for IBM's OS2 for example cost $600 per seat.
 
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