Happy 42nd Birthday to the Microsoft name...

[jebem]

A portuguese company called Microsoft was based in Lisbon since the early 80's and they were not aware that an american company had adopted the same name.

This was not an issue until the internet became popular in late 90's.
So microsoft.pt had a fight with microsoft.com and have accepted good money to let the domain name go to the american company.

I use to visit their shop at Luciano Cordeiro street as my company was on the same street.
They use to sell several brands of pre-personal computer era, like TRS, Canon, Sanyo, Epson, many of them running the popular CP/M 80 and custom applications.

Then IBM changed the business with a new 16 bit architecture Professional Computer based on the Intel 8088 microprocessor. IBM even published the BIOS specification and assembly code listing in a huge book that i brought at the time.

However IBM wanted a operating system similar to CP/M 80 but it should be proprietary.
They contracted an obscure company to develop such OS.
That company was Microsoft and they wanted to sell the OS to IBM.
IBM said no, as they wanted another company to take care of the development and support.

And this was the jackpot for Microsoft.
The IBM PC-DOS 1.0 was born licensed to Microsoft.

About the same time, the company where i was working, Wang Computers, released the Wang PC, a real 16-bit machine based on the Intel 8086 that was four times faster and had localized character set for most countries and was running a proprietary Wang MS-DOS licensed to Microsoft as well.

Later on the Far East started cloning the IBM PC and Microsoft start selling their version of the OS. The MS-DOS was born.

And the rest is history.