What was "Beta" in 1980, the designer was called Tim Patterson,it was released in August 81 to the general Public the company that brought the rights to it paid just $50000.
It was used until very recently in much the same form (almost everyone has used it)
What am I describing? (and what was the companies name?)

Tim Paterson wrote 86-DOS (also called QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System) in 1980 for use on 8086, S100 bus microcomputers. The rights for 86-DOS were purchased by Microsoft in July 1981 and quickly polished up to become MS-DOS v1.0 and offered to IBM for use on their new PC as IBM Personal Computer DOS 1.0. The rest is history.

From: History of MS-DOS

That's the thing I was looking for
Wasn't too hard!