Bill Gates on the origin of PC clones Video
Bill Gates on the origin of PC clones Video Transcript
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>> Looking back, people, I'm sure will take [unintelligible] there were clones and that was not in that word, of course, is obsolete. We have Apache come to us and say they wanted to be the first clone and we thought, "Oh maybe we'll let somebody else go first". And so, Eagle, CompuData and Compaq were the first ones to really try it and there were even these degrees of compatibility. Compaq was the first that really was hardcore about true compatibility which there was a lot of hard work there and it was scary a little bit to know--
>> I know it scares.
>> What was IBM gonna think about this? We have run into our contract that we got the license task to the clone. So, that was a big point of negotiation but would the patent environment allow those clones to thrive. Unfortunately, IBM was somewhat reasonable about the patents and the whole thing flourished because of it.
>> Do you remember the meeting we had at West Coast Computer Fair? Typical Microsoft, they had a party but there was Bill in the back room meeting with all his people with that ideas and I guess it was about [unintelligible]. Because we just started Compaq but we'd already figure it out that if we had to use them as DOS we were dead. It was totally incompatible with PC-DOS and so we set out and we spent about 15 or 20 minutes explaining why Compaq was a goner unless it was really compatible and I think for that point on we worked together. Compaq and Microsoft made MS-DOS really compatible with PC-DOS.
