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Microsoft sent IBM to Digital Research, but Gary Kildal wanted a royalty and not an outright payment & didn't want it sold as PC DOS. So Microsoft bought QDOS and sold it to IBM. The Gary Kildal was out flying story is a lie.
When the IBM team arrived in Pacific Grove they met with Dorothy and worked with company attorney Gervaise “Gerry” Davis to settle the terms of a non-disclosure agreement. Gary, who had flown his aircraft to Oakland to meet an important customer, returned as scheduled to discuss technical matters. The meeting ended in an impasse over financial terms. IBM wished to purchase CP/M outright, whereas DRI sought a per-copy royalty payment in order to protect its existing base of business. With some alternative approaches in mind, Kildall tried to renew the negotiations a week later but IBM did not respond.In the meantime, Gates negotiated terms to purchase 86-DOS from Brock. He then sold a one-time, non-exclusive license to IBM, who used the designation PC DOS, but retained the right to license the product as MS-DOS to others. When Kildall discovered that the function calls of the programmer’s application interface were identical to those of the CP/M Interface Guide that was copyrighted and marked “Proprietary to Digital Research” he threatened IBM with a lawsuit. Kildall and Davis negotiated a resolution that required IBM to market CP/M-86 alongside PC DOS. However the list price differential, $40 vs. $240 for the DRI product, discouraged consumer interest in the latter. Davis says “IBM clearly betrayed the impression they gave Gary and me.”
I'll go with the account of the person who was in the plane at the time that IBM turned up. http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1593/the-rest-of-the-story-how-bill-gates-beat-gary-kildall-in-os-war-part-1 Gary Kildall was in a plane on that day, but IBM waited and they sorted out the NDA issue. But IBM didn't want to pay a royalty and so they went away. Digital Research contacted IBM because they were going to sue over QDOS and IBM gave into all their demands & said they weren't going to bundle either PC DOS or CPM86 and let the customers choose plus giving them $100,000 dollars to do the BIOS. Gary signed thinking that IBM wouldn't be successful but they should just take the money and run, he was wrong. You can argue that IBM overpriced CPM86 on purpose, but Gary let them do it because he didn't think it would matter. But PC DOS winning over CPM86 was nothing to do with IBM not wanting to wait. CPM86 supposedly supported multitasking, but for people buying the 16k model you had so little memory that multitasking wasn't viable. The choice of PC DOS and the 8086 made less sense once shipping in quantity pushed the prices of all the chips down, but nobody predicted that volume would be reached.
I work for a us company with a 3 letter name, that does produce the biggest and most expensive CISC chips and which produces big and expensive RISC chips.I created some mainboard chip,I did work on accelerator chips for the CISC brand,and did parts of two of the latest big RISC chips.But my personal evil world domination plans are this:http://www.apollo-core.com
