I was working for Bob Frankston at Software Arts back then. We had an IBM PC in a locked room. It had no case. The various components were nailed to a wooden board. Since it was being developed by IBM in Boca Raton, we called the company FCS, Florida Computer Systems.

Back then, everybody had to use some kind of API for dealing with the screen, the keyboard and the filesystem. There were just so many systems out there: Bally, Commodore, Radio Shack, Sinclair, Atari, Sony, Apple, IBM, and probably dozens of others.

When a friend of mine heard the IBM announcement, she figured it meant that the Japanese were going to walk away with the market. After all, IBM was the default standard. She was wrong about that, but she was right when she predicted that whoever did the OS for the IBM PC would own the OS market.

We should probably be celebrating the day as Handoff Day, the day that IBM handed off its OS monopoly to Microsoft. IBM was hurting from all the antitrust litigation. I remember mentioning the case on 5th Avenue and one middle aged Cravath, Swain and Moore type went bonkers. He was on a team of lawyers managing teams of lawyers and so on. He was going crazy, and at IBM his name was legion. IBM passed the torch, and Bill Gates ran with it, and even hired his own team of anti-trust lawyers.