Many of you may remember a thread about why DOS succeeded, while CP/M
failed. I suggested that Lotus 123 was the killer app that caused people to
buy the PC. But I wasn't sure why Lotus 123 was written for PC-DOS rather
then CP/M-86, since IBM offered both at the time. I asked Mitch Kapor why,
but his response was lost in all the hurricane confusion.
He says the target was 16-bit machines, due to their greater memory space.
When IBM came into the market with the PC, it was clear that it had the best
chance of becoming the market leader. Even if it didn't, there would
certainly be a large market for the machine, and IBM would surely put great
effort into selling the PC to their existing accounts.
I won't post the entire message, but here's the key point.
"IBM made the choice easy. Even though they offered both, it was clear they
were really behind DOS and not at all behind CP/M-86."
As some of you suggested, it was IBM's efforts to promote DOS over CP/M the
swayed Lotus. I suspect they wanted to prevent Xerox (and others who
already had 8-bit CP/M machines and established dealers) from easily
following them into the 16-bit world.
Mitch wishes us all well in our hurricane recovery efforts. Nice guy...
Ken Elliott
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