Bill Gates didn't write DOS he purchased it after selling it to IBM. More of a business guy than pure programmer.
Steve was in a class himself creating the hardware/software for the orginal apple.
In his book, Idea Man, Paul Allen openly proclaims that Bill Gates was a superior programmer to him. Allen says that he was, however, better than Gates in other ways, including when it came to assembly or anything working very close to hardware (Allen's most important Microsoft product after the very early days, was for example the SoftCard).
Further, Allen illuminates in his book that Gates was in fact an extraordinary programmer. He notes that Gates had a particular gift for raw output, endurance and figuring out ways to make their code as efficient in size as it could possibly be.
This article lends further support:
"Could Bill Gates write code? Yes. And then some, Altair BASIC dis-assemblers reckon"
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_wr...
> Reuben Harris has been disassembling a binary with some help from Monte Davidoff, the third author of Altair BASIC (along with Gates and Paul Allen) and who we interviewed here last week. He has the same question in mind:
> "'Could Bill Gates Write Code?' Or was he merely the luckiest man alive," before concluding... "Yes He Bloody Could!"
> Although Reuben's analysis is not quite complete, he tells us that Gates, Allen and Davidoff threw every trick at the book to squeeze the interpreter into 4 kilobytes. They succeeded and left some headroom for the programs themselves - without which it would have been pretty useless, of course.
> "It was pretty incredible - they were pretty good at what they were doing," he tells us.
Bill Gates actually was a very strong programmer in the early days, so this characterization is misguided. He was very passionate about writing code for other developers, not about catering to end users. It wasn’t until later in Microsoft’s history that he was more business focused.
Happy to dig up articles to back this up, but seriously it should be trivial to find tons via a simple google search if you really care.
Edit: re-DOS, sure they bought it. Do you know anyone who can write an operating system in under a month (the timeline MicroSoft had with IBM)?
It is a nice system for the time.
Microsoft was one of the largest software companies on the planet already by 1980 and among the few software companies in existence of any market relevance or development capability that could appeal to a company the size of IBM.
They did $8 million in sales in 1980, $26 million adjusted to 2019. That was a massive software business at the time, and only five years old.
Bill Gates was far richer than his family by 1980, at the age of 25. Microsoft's margins were extreme back then, 40% to 50% on that $8m. Gates was worth $100+ million inflation adjusted by the end of 1980.
That success was accomplished without using family connections to get deals. It's questionable whether Microsoft required help connecting with IBM. Microsoft was already well on its way to being a billion dollar valuation business in today's dollar.
As I recall the purchased DOS was extensively modified and redone for IBM.
It is worth a read.
At the risk of being rude, if that’s the impression you had, then you’ve been entirely misled. Microsoft in the early days was quiet literally the exact opposite.
I recommend reading virtually any book (there’s a lot) on the early history of MicroSoft.