Question 700

Back in 1980, Tim Paterson, a 24-year-old programmer at Seattle ______ Products, spent four months writing C. Meanwhile, X was on a hunt for a ____ _____ that A could license to B which had the money and factories to build ______, but not the _____ ____ to run them. X bought C for a pittance: $50,000. When Paterson's company figured out what it had let slip through its fingers, it accused A of swindling the company by not revealing that B was its customer; A settled by compensating an additional $1 million in 1986. Identify X, A,B and C.

Answer: Bill Gates(X) bought DOS (C) from Tim Paterson who wrote it while working for Seattle Computer Products and Microsoft(A) licensed it to IBM(B). And as they say, the rest is history!