Reading the history of Seattle Computer Products at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products it's kind of depressing ... out of the whole deal with Microsoft they seem to have ended up with an initial $75k from Microsoft in 1981 ($225k in today's dollars) and then an out of court settlement for $925k in 1985 ($2.3m in today's dollars).
EDIT: It does seem like the actual programmer, Tim Patterson, did better out of it. After working for SCP, he worked a couple stints at Microsoft, and wrote and sold MSX-DOS for the MSX machines as well.
>Paul Allen negotiated an agreement with SCP owner Rod Brock in January, implying that Microsoft had a whole stable of customers eager to run 86-DOS. The deal would essentially allow Microsoft to act as middleman — or, if you like, retailer — in these transactions. For each customer to whom they sold a license for 86-DOS, they would pay SCP $10,000, or $15,000 if the license also included the source code. [...] One clause buried in the contract might have raised a red flag: “Nothing in this licensing agreement shall require Microsoft to identify its customer to Seattle Computer Products.” Brock later said, “That seemed strange to us, but we agreed to go along.” In reality, of course, Microsoft had no stable of eager licensees. They had just one, the biggest fish of all: IBM. Microsoft sold just one license under the agreement, acquiring IBM’s operating system for them complete with source for just $25,000.
Honestly, that’s why you hire good counsel when doing an OEM agreement. It’s not an easy type of agreement to write. So many potential loopholes by which either party can screw the other, as Microsoft clearly did here.
There's a nice talk talk that Tim Paterson gave at Vintage Computer Festival West back in 2019. It's has a nice balance of technical details and background about the business deal.
> After Microsoft objected to Brock's "exaggerated interpretation" of the agreement and informed Brock that his license was nontransferable, Brock sued for US$60 million. The ensuing lawsuit was highly technical and grew to fill hundreds of pages in the months leading up to trial. The trial began at the end of 1986 and lasted three weeks. An out-of-court settlement was reached while the jury was deliberating. Microsoft paid SCP US$925,000 and reclaimed its license for DOS.
Wow! $60M would have killed the 80's version of MicroSoft.
And imagine if Brock had settled for $925,000 worth of MSFT instead of cash. MSFT was $0.10 at IPO in 1986 (accounting for splits, actual price was $21 pre-split) , so he'd have had about 9.5 million shares (after all splits). If he'd kept the stock, it'd be worth $2.9 billion now. Not including any dividends.
EDIT: Also, clearly the "$60M" was not a number conjured out of thin air. That's basically Microsoft's market cap at IPO. Suppose Brock was fundamentally trying to make the point that MS's entire financial success had been built off of this deal.
Reading about the boot process on floppies for PC-86-DOS and FAT brought me back to the old days of Apple DOS and its track 1/sector 1 boot sequence. I wrote a custom boot loader for the floppies I made without DOS on them that simply put up a message saying that the disk wasn't bootable (since otherwise the Apple ][ would just keep spinning the disk and never get anywhere). I don't remember if it was set up so that you could swap in a new disk and press a key to boot.
EDIT: It does seem like the actual programmer, Tim Patterson, did better out of it. After working for SCP, he worked a couple stints at Microsoft, and wrote and sold MSX-DOS for the MSX machines as well.