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In 1981, the company released MS-DOS, which was a renamed version of 86-DOS written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products. 86-DOS took only six weeks to develop and was a clone of Digital Research's CP / M ported for use on the 8086 processor with only two differences from the original: improved disk sector buffering logic and a new FAT12 file system. The first version of 86-DOS was released in August 1980. Under an agreement signed with IBM in November 1980, Microsoft was required to provide an operating system for a new IBM PC based on an Intel 8086 processor. To this end, Microsoft hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 to complete the adaptation of 86-DOS to the IBM PC prototype, and then in July of the same year, it completely bought out the rights to 86-DOS 1.10 for $ 75 thousand. Microsoft retained the version numbering, but renamed the OS to MS-DOS. In August 1981, licensed by the IBM Corporation MS-DOS 1.10 / 1.14 under the name PC DOS 1.0 began shipping with the new personal computers, the IBM PC.

In 1983, Allen left Microsoft, selling part of his shares for $ 10 apiece [16] and retaining a seat on the board of directors. This deal gave him the funds to invest and eventually made him one of the richest people in the world: in 2011 he was 57th on the Forbes list with a capital of $ 13 billion. [17]