for a one-time fee of $50,000.

The contract itself only earned Microsoft a relatively small fee. It was the prestige brought to Microsoft by IBM's adoption of its operating system that would be the origin of Microsoft's transformation from a small business to the leading software company in the world. Gates had not offered to transfer the copyright on the operating system to IBM because he believed that other personal computer makers would clone IBM's PC hardware. They did, making the IBM-compatible PC, running DOS, a de facto