Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home.

I'm Brian McCullough.

Okay, no preamble needed, though I will give you some of the audio from yesterday to catch you up on where we're at.

But really simply, this is part two of Gary Kildall, the man who could have been Bill Gates.

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 Sams.

Samms, 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 license them. 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, he didn't have the

rights to do that. And that it was not, he said, but I think it's ready. I think Gary's got ready to go.

I said, well, no time like the the president called Gary. So Bill right there with them in the room, called Gary Killedall, 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 Sams. this time from the book Hard Drive, Bill Gates

and the making of the Microsoft Empire.

Quote, 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,

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