What is The role of Bill Gates of Microsoft in the development of the current personal comuter?

Answer 1

The short story:

When IBM created their first Personal Computer in the early 80's a small company called Microsoft was going to provide the OS and a BASIC compilier for programming.

Bill Gates negotiated with IBM to License rather than sell the OS. IBM's thinks was that the maoney was in the hardware and that people would be buying their machines so licensing the OS would not be a financial impact upon PC revenue.

So IBM own'ed the hardware and MS owned the OS.

The OS is what makes the hardware work and by using the same OS different manufacturers hardware would be able to work together.

Initially PC clones had differeent hard ware and different customized OS's. This meant that PC's had different levels of compatability. One or more from the following would define a machine as compatable:

1.) Read BM files
2.) Write IBM files
3.) Execute IBM files

My first IBM clone a Sanyo MBC-550 could only do the first two on the list. It could not run an IBM program on run software specifically written for it. It was difficult if not impossible to finde a clone that was fully compatabile with an IBM because of hardware patents and licensing. This limited PC market growth

This stiffled the growth in the PC market as each PC manufacture developed no only hardware but software as well. The ammount of software availble also impacted sales of the machines. (each manufacturer had their own OS and duplicated application software development with that of their competitors) This slowed PC sales growth acorss the market as consumers were unlikely to spend 3000 to 4000 dollars for a machine that had limited software.

Because of IBM's initial market penetration IBM was THE standard for both hardware and software. In a move which broke down the last compatability barrier IBM removed the final barrier by allowing cloning of its hardware.

Now any manufacturer could build a fully compatible IBM clone hardware wise AND use the same OS by licensing from Microsoft. This ensured interoperability and full compatabliity with any PC clone.

This ultimately lead to a drop in pc prices and the rest is history....

Answer 2

Very Little. Go rent the movie "Pirates Of Silicon Valley" for a short synopsis.