Stok Software's role with the development of Concurrent PC-DOS
In 1980 representatives of IBM went to visit Gary Kildall, president of Digital Research, Inc (DRI), with the interest in his operating system for their Personal Computer that was completing development.DRI had an operating system called CP/M. Talks with IBM were inconclusive and IBM went to Bill Gates. Mr. Gates had originally sent IBM to Mr. Kildall because he was too busy making a new version of BASIC, a programming language. But he later accepted the assignment when IBM came back after failure to work out a deal with Mr. Kildall.
With hopes of re-capturing the Operating System market lost to Microsoft,
DRI asked Stok Software to help develop Concurrent PC-DOS in 1984.
This was a PC operating system that allowed running four programs in four windows simultaneously.
Stok Software wrote the hard disk backup program (called BackRest) that was included in Concurrent PC-DOS.
Stok also worked on programming the Concurrent PC-DOS Program Manager routines.
Microsoft's MS-DOS and eventually Windows became the industry chosen Operating Systems. Life would have been different for us if Gary had accepted IBM's offer.
DRI was ultimately purchased by Novell.