“first from Xerox, then Apple”
Actually Bill and Paul just bought it from Seattle Computer Systems which was just making a version of Digital Research’s DOS product which of course was just an evolution of CP/M...which the actual smart guy Gary Kildow thought up in ‘72.
It was Jobs who went over to Xerox PARC and toured Adelle Goldberg’s lab, who was furious that the idiot management there let him in. He stole everything...and called it the Mac. After a misstart with the ridiculous Lisa box.
But most everything you say is true. Gates is filthy rich cuz Mommy was on the board of IBM. If he had been anyone else doing compilers at the time, he would still be a small operation somewhere in the trees of Redmond.
The ruling class keeps the cash in the gang. Our cash.
Sorry, Kildow s/b “Kildall”.
Just doing things from memory...
They bought DOS yes, I know the story very well as I’m a very few miles from the groups involved.
But word processing, spreadsheet, graphics, WYSIWYG OS adaptations were stolen from Xerox, and later from Apple.