Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed. Microsoft applications like Multiplan were available for a variety of platforms, running CP/M and a variety of other operating systems. You could get Multiplan for systems as small as the TI-99/4 and as large as Xenix!
> Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed.
Not actually true. DOS was already done when Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox Parc to start its application division in 1981.
Multiplan and Word were the first results, released in 1983, by which time it was obvious that Lotus 1-2-3 was going to win.
Simonyi had big ideas about "metaprogramming" and using what was basically a VM to make applications portable. (I ran Multiplan on a Tandy 100-style portable, where the program came on a chip!)
In an interview, Simonyi said:
QUOTE
"Multiplan was done on a byte-coded interpreting system, much like Java. It was probably the most ported system ever deployed. We thought that the market would be fractured for a long time and that we would be on all of those machines -- which we were.
"Interestingly enough, MS-DOS changed that and created a unified market. And, of course, Lotus 1-2-3 made their bet on creating a single, optimized, direct implementation for MS-DOS, and they cleaned up. We learned a lot from that failure. And then of course, when the next shift came to GUIs [graphical user interfaces], we cleaned their clock with Excel."
Supposedly, Microsoft Office used a bytecode language for a long time afterward, at least into the 1990s. Old time Mac users probably remember MS Office 4.2, which was an identical clone of the Windows version and ran like molasses.
