Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

Briefly: Bill Gates came from wealthy Seattle aristocracy. During the early eighties, his mother served on the executive committee of the United Way, along with IBM’s then CEO John Opel. This allowed William Henry Gates III (her son) to score a meeting with IBM about providing a code compiler for IBM’s new, epoch-making product, the IBM PC. What IBM really wanted, though, was an operating system, the core code that manages memory and runs programs. Gates, whose nascent company, Microsoft, didn’t have anything like an entire operating system, honestly referred IBM to a company run by Gary Kildall, a pioneer in operating systems when the real money in computers was still in the hardware. In a story couched in legend, Kildall was off flying his personal plane when IBM representatives physically came knocking at his company’s office. His wife (the company’s business manager) refused to sign IBM’s aggressive nondisclosure agreement and sent them packing, and so IBM grudgingly went back to Gates asking about operating systems. Gates, smelling an opportunity, offered to provide one, hiring a local Seattle programmer to clone Kildall’s operating system, calling it QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), and which eventually shipped in the IBM PC as DOS (Disk Operating System). Gates, correctly suspecting that other hardware companies would copy IBM’s approach of bundling software separately from hardware, retained copyright over this hacked and copied DOS. As a result, the procee...