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At the time, Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system was the industry standard.

Even though the newly established Microsoft company couldn’t fill IBM’s needs, Gates and Allen saw an opportunity, and so they hurriedly bought the rights to another local company’s OS — which was based on Kildall’s CP/M system.

It was sold for a quarter of the price of CP/M, a rival's product, and IBM's market power did the rest.

Looking back, this was the nail in the coffin for CP/M, or competing PC operating systems for years to come. 

Mr. Kildall, who died in 1994, invented the CP/M operating system in 1974, and it was the standard operating system for most PCs until the early 1980s.