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The first Personal Computer was the ALTAR computer. It was only available in as an assemble it yourself kit. It used the CP/M operating system written by Gary Kidwell. Bill Gates bought one of them and learned how CP/M worked. He also saw the possibilities of personal computers. He realized that people who were not Geeks would want to be able to use computers and that they would want to be able to use programs simpler than CP/M. (One early word processing program, Word Star, tried to use as a selling point, "You can call your own machine language programs." What secretary is able to type a machine language program?)

As Personal Computers grew more popular, Bill Gates bought a small company producing an operating system compatible with CP/M and put out MS-DOS, a different operating system. He created other programs. He dropped out of Harvard and set up his business in his garage. When IBM set up their personal computer division, they made either MS-DOS or CP/M available. Since MS-Dos sold for a lot less, most people chose that as the operating system. Only people using some mini computers in their business that used CP/M chose to go with the more expensive CP/M. Of course when they could use programs the business owned, it was not more expensive.

When Gates came out with the Windows operating system, it really took off. At that time so did clones of the IBM computer. The prices of Personal Computers dropped. Gates had close to a monopoly on Operating Systems. No one had a monopoly on hardware. That is how he got so rich.

Now that Linux exists as an open source operating system and that Google has its own processing system with memory storage in the cloud, the future of Microsoft is debatable. Stay tuned.

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