Editing Seattle Computer Products (section)

=={{anchor|Rod Brock}}Corporate history==
Twenty-two-year-old [[Tim Paterson]] was hired in June 1978 by SCP's owner Rodney Maurice Brock (26 August 1930 – 30 November 2018).<ref name="Nevada_2018"/><ref name="Obituary_2018"/> At the time, SCP built memory boards for microcomputers, but after attending a local seminar on Intel's just-released 8086 in late summer 1978, Paterson convinced Brock that his company should design a CPU board for the new chip. Paterson had a prototype working by May 1979,<ref name="Hunter_1983_Softalk"/> and he took his "computer" over to Microsoft, who were working on an 8086 [[BASIC]], which was working before the end of May.<ref name="Manes_1993_Gates"/>

When the board began shipping in November, standalone [[Microsoft BASIC]] was offered as an option, but no operating system was available for it.<ref name="Microsoft BASIC-86"/> [[Digital Research]], whose [[8-bit]] [[CP/M]] operating system was the industry standard, was working on an 8086-compatible version called [[CP/M-86]], but the delay in its release was costing SCP sales. In order to fill this void, Paterson wrote QDOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating System)<ref name="Conner_1998"/> over a four-month period starting in April 1980. QDOS 0.11 was finished in August 1980, and SCP began shipping it in September 1980.<ref name="Wallace_1992"/> The operating system was renamed to [[86-DOS]] in December 1980.

Microsoft, having worked with SCP before and seeking an operating system they could modify for the IBM PC, bought the rights to market the 86-DOS operating system to other manufacturers for {{US$|link=yes|25000}} that same month. On 27 July 1981, just prior to the launch of the IBM PC on the 12 August 1981, Microsoft bought the full rights to the operating system for an additional {{US$|link=no|50000}}, giving SCP a perpetual royalty-free license to sell 86-DOS (including updated versions) with its computer hardware.<ref name="Wallace_1992"/> Realizing that Microsoft was making significant profit on the 86-DOS operating system, SCP attempted to sell it along with a stand-alone inexpensive CPU (without any other circuitry). This was allowed as per SCP's license with Microsoft, which let SCP sell the operating system with their 8086-based computers; this operating system was marketed as "Seattle DOS", and a CPU was included in the box it shipped in.

Thanks to the deal with Microsoft, additional capital allowed Seattle Computer to expand its memory business into providing additional memory for PC products. The company had its best year in 1982, reaping more than a million dollars in profit on about {{US$|long=no|4 million}} in sales.<ref name="Wallace_1992"/>

By 1985, however, SCP's business was having difficulty trying to compete with offshore products (Brock once said, "they were selling memory boards for less than his cost for parts"), and Brock decided to sell the company. The only major asset SCP had left was the license it received from Microsoft when it signed over ownership rights to 86-DOS. Brock planned to sell (via merger) the license to the highest bidder, with a company such as the [[Tandy Corporation]] in mind. After Microsoft objected to Brock's "exaggerated interpretation" of the agreement and informed Brock that his license was nontransferable, Brock sued for {{US$|link=no|60 million}}. The ensuing lawsuit was highly technical and grew to fill hundreds of pages in the months leading up to trial. The trial began at the end of 1986 and lasted three weeks. An out-of-court settlement was reached while the jury was deliberating. Microsoft paid SCP {{US$|link=no|925000}} and reclaimed its license for DOS.<ref name="Wallace_1992"/>

SCP went out of business in the late 1980s as the market for Intel 8086 systems became dominated by [[IBM-compatible|PC compatible computer]]s.