Dave Plummer

And all of a sudden, you're just in an environment where like, uh-oh, I'm just not going to speak because I don't want to look stupid.

I think he was relentless in the pursuit of his one dream, which was his old slogan of a computer in every home and a computer in every desk.

It was his special interest.

He was a smart guy, super determined, and he hired people that were as smart or smarter than him to help him execute it.

And he built an almost unstoppable machine of intellect to go forth and make things

Let's say very simple products.

MS-DOS is not a complicated product by any stretch, but it's exactly what the market needed at that time.

Yeah, before DOS, they were largely a language company.

So they had made BASIC for a lot of computers, and they had a Fortran compiler and a Pascal compiler, that kind of thing.

But their deal to have MS-DOS included with every version or every instance of the PC effectively set them as a standard that they were able to leverage for decades going forward.

And to a certain extent, they lucked into that.

And on the other hand, they were smart to have done it.

Because they didn't charge IBM a lot of money for it, but making it a standard...

really played out to their advantage over time.

It's largely a command launcher.

So you type in a name of a command, it looks up to see if that's in the current directory or on a special path of folders, and it loads it into memory and executes it if it's there.

And that's 90% of what MS-DOS does.

Now, it has environment variables and some complexity and a small scripting language built in.

But it is basically just an operating system shell that allows you to use the resources of the computer, like the hard drive or the CPU.

And it doesn't allow you to multitask.