The alternative to the cheap DOS that Bill Gates had to offer IBM for their pilot Personal Computer project running out of Boca Raton was a clever cross-platform operating system developed at UCSD called the UCSD P-System. It's object files could be read by any platform using the OS, regardless of which platform they had been developed on. The system was commercialized and owned by a company called SoftTech Microsystems in Rancho Bernardo, CA, a subsidiary of SofTech in Massachusetts.

But when IBM came to enquire about using the P-system for the nascent PC, a bright young aggressive marketing executive whose name escapes me got a bit too big for her britches and offered a pricey per-copy deal which would have neded up being prohibitively expensive to IBM. So the IBM folks went up to Northern California to see Mister Gates instead (I think this was well before Microsoft went to Seattle.)

And that's why you got DOS and copy a:* instead of a: pip b: ... (just kidding -- that was CP/M, another candidate that didn't make the cut.)

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