In 1977, the "trinity" of dominant home computers was the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80, and Microsoft was a tiny startup.
Microsoft didn't enter the OS space until 1980 - before that they sold and licensed BASIC interpreters, and they were small enough that Commodore/Tramiel infamously managed to buy a fixed price (single payment) license that they hung onto for many years to avoid having to negotiate a new deal for newer versions. They got in the region of $50k or something like that.
In 1980 they licensed Unix and launched Xenix. It was first in 1981 PC DOS/MS DOS made its appearance. At that point they had only 100 employees. By 1983, Microsofts revenue finally reached $55 million.
In 1981 Commodore saw an explosion in their unit sales with the VIC-20, while Apple milked far higher revenue per unit instead.
For comparison to MS $55m in 1983, Commodore had revenues of $125 million in 1980, $186 million in 1981 and $681 million in 1983, before reaching its all time peak of $1.2bn in 1984 (they exceeded $1bn again once more in 1990)
Apple had $118 million in revenue in 1980 and $1.51B in 1984.
It was first towards the end of the 1980's that Microsoft became dominant.
Gates and Jobs were not at all rivals during the short time Osborne Computers existed. I don't think there even was an MS-DOS back then; IIRC, the Osborne 1 ran CP/M.
(I almost wrote "Osborne-1" but conveniently there is an Osborne 1 sticker on my desk and I happened to glance at it!)
Microsoft sold a BASIC interpreter to Apple, they wrote some games (Olympic Decathalon!) and even sold a 16KB RAM expansion card and Z80 coprocessor for a while.
A short while back someeone asked what Hacker News would be arguing about, if it existed in 1976. My answer was "Bill Gates' famous 'An Open Letter to Hobbyists'".
In 1977, the "trinity" of dominant home computers was the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80, and Microsoft was a tiny startup.
Microsoft didn't enter the OS space until 1980 - before that they sold and licensed BASIC interpreters, and they were small enough that Commodore/Tramiel infamously managed to buy a fixed price (single payment) license that they hung onto for many years to avoid having to negotiate a new deal for newer versions. They got in the region of $50k or something like that.
In 1980 they licensed Unix and launched Xenix. It was first in 1981 PC DOS/MS DOS made its appearance. At that point they had only 100 employees. By 1983, Microsofts revenue finally reached $55 million.
In 1981 Commodore saw an explosion in their unit sales with the VIC-20, while Apple milked far higher revenue per unit instead.
For comparison to MS $55m in 1983, Commodore had revenues of $125 million in 1980, $186 million in 1981 and $681 million in 1983, before reaching its all time peak of $1.2bn in 1984 (they exceeded $1bn again once more in 1990)
Apple had $118 million in revenue in 1980 and $1.51B in 1984.
It was first towards the end of the 1980's that Microsoft became dominant.