Microsoft Once Paid $280M For Rigging Early Windows Against Competitors

For those unaware, Microsoft once faked an installation error for Windows 3.1 if a user was trying to install it atop DR DOS, and the story is spreading quickly as a pertinent reminder of the ruthless ambition during the early days of the personal computer boom.

The death of DR DOS is a sad story. DR DOS was a highly-compatible, viable competitor to MS-DOS, and at the time of its release was widely considered superior to MS-DOS due to its lower price and generally better performance, without any major downsides. Since Windows 3.1 was essentially a GUI that ran on top of MS-DOS, the existence of DR DOS posed a threat to Microsoft's growing dominance at the time, and the team at Redmond simply would not have that.

So, what did Microsoft do? It made the Windows 3.1 installer false-flag DR DOS and report it as a compatibility issue. Attempting...

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