Robert "Bob" O'Rear is a former employee of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

, and is among the group of eleven early Microsoft employees who posed for an iconic company photo taken in Albuquerque in 1978. A

Texan Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by b ...

, he has degrees in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...

. He left Microsoft in 1993, and reportedly owns a cattle ranch in Texas. His

net worth Net worth is the value of all the non-financial and financial assets owned by an individual or institution minus the value of all its outstanding liabilities. Since financial assets minus outstanding liabilities equal net financial assets, net ...

is reported to be about $100 million.

Early life

O'Rear, born in

Wellington, Texas Wellington is a city and county seat of Collingsworth County, Texas, United States. The population was 2,189 at the 2010 census. History Sometime in 1889 or 1890, as smaller ranches and farmlands were being purchased, Ernest Theodore O'Neil, h ...

, was brought up in Perryton, a rural town of 3,500 people in the

Texas Panhandle The Texas Panhandle is a region of the U.S. state of Texas consisting of the northernmost 26 counties in the state. The panhandle is a square-shaped area bordered by New Mexico to the west and Oklahoma to the north and east. It is adjacent to ...

by his grandparents, who were sharecroppers on a cotton farm. O'Rear planned to be a physical education teacher, but later ended up graduating from the

University of Texas at El Paso The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is a public research university in El Paso, Texas. It is a member of the University of Texas System. UTEP is the second-largest university in the United States to have a majority Mexican American stud ...

with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He went on to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin to study mathematics and astrophysics. In 1966, TRW in Redondo Beach hired O'Rear to work on Air Force spy satellite programs. He also wrote programs that optimized the trajectory of Minuteman missiles during the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...

. Later on, in the 1960s, he went to work for

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...

. He helped write a program that determined the trajectory of the

Apollo Command Module The Apollo command and service module (CSM) was one of two principal components of the United States Apollo spacecraft, used for the Apollo program, which landed astronauts on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. The CSM functioned as a mother shi ...

as it reentered the

Earth's atmosphere The atmosphere of Earth is the layer of gases, known collectively as air, retained by Earth's gravity that surrounds the planet and forms its planetary atmosphere. The atmosphere of Earth protects life on Earth by creating pressure allowing fo ...

, and was in the NASA Command Center when

Neil Armstrong Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who became the first person to walk on the Moon in 1969. He was also a naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor. ...

landed on the Moon. Later in the 1970s, O'Rear and a friend from his TRW days founded a company called Texametrics that made automated machinery for the manufacturing of polyurethane bottle caps. O'Rear worked on a program that analyzed the patterns of correctly manufactured caps and caused the incorrectly manufactured parts to be ejected. During this time, O'Rear worked with both hardware and software that helped him later when he joined

Microsoft

O'Rear first joined

in 1977 and became the seventh employee. He went to work as the company's chief mathematician and project manage

He learned how programs were put together and also reworked some of the math code in them. After the success of the

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few o ...

and the

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...

, O'Rear became the director of international sales and marketing.

IBM PC and MS-DOS

entered an agreement with

Seattle Computer Products Seattle Computer Products (SCP) was a Tukwila, Washington, microcomputer hardware company which was one of the first manufacturers of computer systems based on the 16-bit Intel 8086 processor. SCP began shipping its first S-100 bus 8086 CPU ...

to acquire marketing rights for

86-DOS 86-DOS (known internally as QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System) is a discontinued operating system developed and marketed by Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for its Intel 8086-based computer kit. 86-DOS shared a few of its commands wi ...

, which had been built to work on the

Intel 8086 The 8086 (also called iAPX 86) is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus (allo ...

and so would work on the IBM PC's

Intel 8088 The Intel 8088 ("''eighty-eighty-eight''", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on June 1, 1979, the 8088 has an eight-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and ...

since the chips were binary compatible. Work then began as soon as the first prototype of the

was received in Thanksgiving of 1980, and O'Rear was assigned both project lead and sole programmer. Despite difficulties with both hardware and software (and some communication delays with IBM), O'Rear produced PC DOS v1.0 in August 1981. The boot sector of the

PC DOS PC or pc may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Player character or playable character, a fictional character controlled by a human player, usually in role-playing games or computer games * '' Port Charles'', an American daytime TV soap opera * ...

v1.0 floppy disk even bears his name, instead of the 'Microsoft Inc' text of subsequent versions. The success of

and IBM's branding of it (

) made Microsoft a

Fortune 500 The ''Fortune'' 500 is an annual list compiled and published by ''Fortune (magazine), Fortune'' magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States Joint-stock company#Closely held corporations and publicly traded corporations, corporations by ...

company.

Retirement

O'Rear retired from Microsoft in 1993. O'Rear started a ranch in the Texas Panhandle where he grew up with his brother. While O'Rear provides the financing and business structure, his brother runs and operates the ranch. He spends more time with his family and pursues his hobbies, including

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

racquetball Racquetball is a racquet sport and a team sport played with a hollow rubber ball on an indoor or outdoor court. Joseph Sobek invented the modern sport of racquetball in 1950, adding a stringed racquet to paddleball in order to increase velo ...

, and

skiing Skiing is the use of skis to glide on snow. Variations of purpose include basic transport, a recreational activity, or a competitive winter sport. Many types of competitive skiing events are recognized by the International Olympic Committee ( ...

. O'Rear is also a director on several boards of local businesses and invests in real estate development. Just before his retirement, he joined the advisory council on the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso, his alma mater, through which he keeps a working relationship between the university and Microsoft by encouraging recruit students from the university.

Bibliography

* Tsang, Cheryl D. Microsoft First Generation. Canada: John Wiley & Sons inc., 2000.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Orear, Bob Microsoft employees DOS people University of Texas at El Paso alumni Living people People from Wellington, Texas Year of birth missing (living people)