Seattle Computer Products

~ the obituary ~

The operating system was a side project to help sell circuit boards. That is the entire story of Seattle Computer Products in one sentence, and everything after it is arithmetic about which half of a business turns out to matter.

Rod Brock started the company in 1978 in Tukwila, south of Seattle, making memory boards for S-100 machines. He hired a 22 year old named Tim Paterson that june. When Intel released the 8086 later that year, Paterson talked Brock into designing a processor board for it, and by november 1979 the company was shipping one of the first 16-bit CPU boards anybody could buy for that bus. It was genuinely early hardware. The problem was that no operating system existed for it. Digital Research had promised a version of CP/M for the 8086 and kept not delivering.

So in april 1980 Paterson started writing one himself. He kept the CP/M way of doing things so existing software could be translated across, added a file table of his own design, and had a working version by that august. The internal name was QDOS, for quick and dirty operating system, which tells you exactly how seriously anyone at the company took it. In december it was renamed 86-DOS, and that same month a company in Bellevue paid twenty five thousand dollars for the right to sell it. Microsoft did not say who the customer was. The customer was IBM.

None of this reached me as a name. It reached me as behavior. The drive letter with a colon after it and the file name of eight characters with three more after the dot were decisions made in a small office in Tukwila in 1980, by one programmer in a hurry, and I typed against them for years before I ever heard of the company that paid his salary. The FAT table that a cheap USB stick still formats itself with came out of the same four months.

~ the case file ~

~ the deal ~

The december 1980 payment bought marketing rights, not the software. On 27 july 1981, a few weeks before the IBM PC went on sale, Microsoft came back and bought the whole thing outright for another fifty thousand dollars. Seventy five thousand in total, and Brock signed because from where he sat it was found money for a program written to move hardware.

He was not stupid about it. He kept a license permitting Seattle Computer Products to sell DOS with its own machines, which at the time looked like the valuable half of the arrangement. His company made computers. Microsoft made a program that would presumably end up on a few thousand IBM units. Nobody in that room in 1981 had the numbers that would make the trade look absurd, because the numbers did not exist yet.

~ the lawsuit ~

By the mid eighties the S-100 bus was finished and so was the company. PC compatibles had taken the market, and the only asset Brock had left with any value was that license to ship DOS. When he tried to sell it as part of winding the business down, Microsoft argued it was not transferable, and the two of them ended up in front of a jury in late 1986.

It settled in december of that year. Microsoft paid nine hundred and twenty five thousand dollars to buy the license back, which the wire copy at the time rounded up to nearly a million. That was the last money Seattle Computer Products ever made, and it came from selling the same software twice to the same buyer.

~ the inheritance ~

Paterson went to Microsoft in 1981, left, came back, and spent much of his career there. Brock died in 2018. The company itself is a footnote with a very long tail: MS-DOS carried Microsoft through the eighties, funded Windows, and set the terms of the personal computer industry for a generation.

What gets lost in the retelling is that Seattle Computer Products was not a software house that got robbed. It was a hardware company that correctly identified its product and correctly identified its side project, and was wrong only because the entire industry rearranged itself around the side project within eighteen months. Almost nobody saw that coming. The people who did were in Bellevue, writing the check.

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