Reading the history of Seattle Computer Products at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products</a> it's kind of depressing ... out of the whole deal with Microsoft they seem to have ended up with an initial $75k from Microsoft in 1981 ($225k in today's dollars) and then an out of court settlement for $925k in 1985 ($2.3m in today's dollars).<p>EDIT: It does seem like the actual programmer, Tim Patterson, did better out of it. After working for SCP, he worked a couple stints at Microsoft, and wrote and sold MSX-DOS for the MSX machines as well.
Reading about the boot process on floppies for PC-86-DOS and FAT brought me back to the old days of Apple DOS and its track 1/sector 1 boot sequence. I wrote a custom boot loader for the floppies I made without DOS on them that simply put up a message saying that the disk wasn't bootable (since otherwise the Apple ][ would just keep spinning the disk and never get anywhere). I don't remember if it was set up so that you could swap in a new disk and press a key to boot.