The “Unholy Alliance” That Changed Tech Forever

In the early 1980s, deep in Boca Raton, Florida, a small, secretive group of IBM engineers was hard at work developing something that would change the world: the IBM Personal Computer (PC).

But great hardware needed powerful software.

So in a meeting that would later be dubbed the "Unholy Alliance," IBM representatives sat down with two rising stars in the tech world—Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of a then-small company called Microsoft.

Their goal? To license software and an operating system for the still-developing IBM PC.

What came out of that meeting was historic:
👉 IBM licensed Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.
👉 Microsoft retained the rights to license it to other manufacturers.
👉 The PC revolution was born—and Microsoft skyrocketed to tech dominance.

This “alliance” was seen as risky at the time—IBM betting on a small software firm, and Microsoft stepping into a massive, high-stakes project. But it paved the way for the modern computer era, shaping how we use technology today.

What started as a quiet meeting in Boca Raton ignited a digital revolution that’s still evolving.