HAHA so true . its funny we blame him But really Ill bet the guy has not wrote one line of C## in 10 Years ..
Actually it is a matter of legend in the computer industry that the last code actually written by Bill Gates was part of the firmware for the Tandy Model 100 portable computer. This was the nearly last gasp of the original project that launched Microsoft, BillG's Basic interpreter for the Altair which became the basis for the Tandy TRS-80 firmware Basic. This would have been around 1981, and in 8085 assembly language.
Incidentally, that Basic interpreter was Smile. It was both slower and bloatier than the Apple ][ Basic interpreter, which tokenized numeric constants as well as keywords, and all of its iterations were buggy as hell and required workarounds with assembly language stored in Pascal strings via POKE to accomplish anything useful.
Bill Gates reminds me of Andrew Carnegie. Both are/were ruthless competitors that left a trail of destruction in their wake, but in the process were instrumental in colonizing new territory...Carnegie with inexpensive steel rails that brought settlers West, and ore and cattle East; and Bill Gates with a PC (or five) in every home - not toy PCs like a Pet or an Atari - but the real deal...flexible, expandable, networked PCs that every would-be developer could hitch his wagon to.
I think we've benefited from Bill Gates vision, drive, and competitive nature. At the same time, as others have pointed out, the dominance of MS is what fuels all the alternatives. Thank goodness for alternatives! Windows seems to have hit the inner-city blight stage - a victim of its own success.
Windows seems to have hit the inner-city blight stage - a victim of its own success.
This is a very good observation, but it can be generalized; like an inner city it has gone through waves of blight and recovery.
DOS 1.x -- I got this instead of CP/M why?
DOS 2.1 -- usable
DOS 3.3 -- pretty darn good
DOS 4.x -- my game won't run!
DOS 5.x -- fixed a lot of what 4.x broke
DOS 6.x -- pretty darn good
Windows 95 -- I got this instead of a Mac why?
Windows 98 -- Hey, now it almost works
Windows 98SE -- pretty darn good
Windows ME -- WTF?
on collision course: Windows 2000 -- works well for what it does, except none of my peripherals work
Windows XP -- pretty darn good
Windows Vista -- Which version do I need again? And WTF?
Windows 7 -- had a chance at pretty darn good but the DRM and version confusion are WTF?
I have no problem admitting that some Microsoft products have been brilliant. But greed gets them in the end every time. There is a tremendous amount of business software out there that runs fine in Windows 7 Pro 32-bit, but simply will not run at all on the default Windows 7 home offered in just about every brick and mortar PC store.
Microsoft recognized the difficulties of programming for a Windows-like environment and came out with Visual Basic, which became the most popular computing language in history because it elegantly provided for RAD in such environments, then they screwed over the authors of billions of lines of code by trying to force them to .NET, which is completely incompatible with VB3/4/5/6 in fundamental ways that in many cases can't be easily fixed, and now there is rumbling that they are fixing to screw over the sheeple who sucked it up and migrated to .NET for the Next Big Incompatible Idea.
Personally, my plan (endorsed by my corporate masters) is that since our in-house customer application needs haven't changed much since we were implementing them on 20 MHz 80286's, that our next generation of customer apps will be implemented with P8X32A-based boxes built by us. All our customers have to know is that it's a turnkey embedded device and if we need a richer user interface than we can get with a Propeller display, there is always the web browser over ethernet.
IBM would have bought Digital Research's CP/M 86. Instead of splitting with IBM over OS/2, Digital Research would have went along with IBM. This would have allowed Apple to consolidate their hold on the GUI in the consumer space as OS/2 was originally a text mode OS.
It took nerves of steel for Microsoft to split with IBM over OS/2, push Windows (pre-3.1), while changing their GUI in a way that would get Apple to sue them. At the time Windows really stunk and I thought Microsoft was digging its grave with it.
@localroger, since Microsoft has abandoned every previous development platform (MFC, COM, ATL, WTL, and WinForms) why should VB and WPF/.Net be any different? To get promoted within MS you probably need to do something new rather than improve what is old. On an aesthetic level I find re-writes to keep up with MS tech churn a waster, but on a purely selfish level re-writes employ programmers which reduces competition for my job.
@localroger, since Microsoft has abandoned every previous development platform (MFC, COM, ATL, WTL, and WinForms) why should VB and WPF/.Net be any different?
Well VB brought a lot of people to the koolaid dispenser who had never been there before. At the time (especially ca. VB 3) they were still supporting QuickBasic and Ballmer was yelling "Developers! Developers! Developers!" so if you didn't know the deep background you might think you were hitching to a train that was not scheduled toward a cliff.
Nowadays I use my VB4/6 codebase since Windows (including Win7, with one bugfix) seems to support it, but I am never investing in another Microsoft development system.
Not sure why, maybe Microsoft makes a good piper, but a lot of people seem ready to jump of the cliff they call the cloud. Scares the Smile out of me.
The day is not far off when you no longer install an app locally, the vendor, and government if they see fit, can shut you down at any time.
And imagine the wonderful pay-per-use schemes that will arise.
I fear the age of "personal" computing may have been very short lived.
Not sure why, maybe Microsoft makes a good piper, but a lot of people seem ready to jump of the cliff they call the cloud. Scares the Smile out of me.
The day is not far off when you no longer install an app locally, the vendor, and government if they see fit, can shut you down at any time.
And imagine the wonderful pay-per-use schemes that will arise.
I fear the age of "personal" computing may have been very short lived.
C.W.
It's certainly not just Microsoft that is pushing cloud. I think that other players are pushing it more than they are.
I think you are giving too much credit to Bill Gates and Microsoft. First of all it was IBM that came out with the PC and legitimized "personal computers" as well as providing cma for corporate purchases of PC's. As for the operating system, if it were not Microsoft Windows it would be IBM OSsomerthing, or Apple OSsomething else, or some other contender. The technology was there, the time was right, and it could have been any company that was in the business and lucky enough to have the right product ready.
Does anyone really think it would be any better if it were some other company? They are in business to make money, and would not be much if any different than Microsoft. As for trusting "the cloud", thanks, but no thank you. I would not trust a corporation any more than I would a politician. Or a con man, fraud artist, televangelist, or salesman come to think of it.
The parallels run even deeper than those mentioned. Let's not forget the philanthropy of both during their later years. My little corner of the U.S., as are so many towns across the country, is blessed with a Carnegie Library, which today is still a very active public library. And whatever you may think about Bill Gates the entrepreneur, Bill Gates the man has redeemed that entrepreneur guy ten times over through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
All this anti-cloud talk, what are you a bunch of Penguinistas? Just kidding, I'm a big Linux fan and cloud computing is time sharing reborn, and I hated it the first time around. CPU charges for each compilation were a major drag.
I complain about Microsoft as much as the next person, but I use their software on a daily basis. Overall I would say that compared to some truly nasty companies out there, Microsoft is a saint. There's a local chemical company and an incident in Woburn that comes to mind.
We're stuck with the cloud.. there's no getting out of it.
As long as folks know they have to be the ones to protect their data, then there's no issue. (My customers can barely keep an up-to-date antivirus running, so who am I kidding here??!)
The only part of the cloud I don't like is that it is taking ownership of my files. For instance, I got an invite to Google music. Pretty cool. I can play my music anywhere (on any machine) once it's uploaded. Don't see any place to download my music again. Cloud now owns my data if I lose my "originals" I pay my subscription to Netflix cloud movie service.. Watch anything I want (almost), but now own nothing.
I wonder how much more advanced computing would be if Microsoft never existed?
In my opinion, home and business computers what not be where they are today if Microsoft never existed. In addition to the operating system, you must also consider all the supplemental programs that could be run from that operating system. GUI, Windows, and Microsoft brought us out of the computer dark ages.
In my humble opinion, it would not be more advanced, it would be retarded.
We're stuck with the cloud.. there's no getting out of it.
As long as folks know they have to be the ones to protect their data, then there's no issue.
The practical issue that I fear is the loss of high powered PC's as a commodity. As more and more computation happens "in the cloud", end users will need less power on their end as they will basically have a terminal.
This is already being driven on the business side with VMWare View and similar systems, the goal is to compute in the data center and deploy terminal devices for the users. I can see the benefit in areas like medical, banking, insurance, etc.
We already have seen the loss of low cost 1920 x 1200 displays due to the overwhelming consumer demand for 1920 x 1080 for HDTV, that's an example of losing the higher end item due to consumer demand going in another direction.
For the average consumer, these changes are probably beneficial, but I think it means having a boat load of computational power on my desktop may be a lot more expensive in the future.
I understand that the cloud as whole may make incredible computing power available at low cost, but users will be at the mercy of providers, and that is not a good thing.
I think you are giving too much credit to Bill Gates and Microsoft.
For better or for worse, I don't think a Gary Kildall - or IBM for that matter - would have had the interest or motivation to see the original OS through as many evolutions and revolutions as it went through. Bill Gates was maniacal that if the company slacked for a moment, someone else was going to eat their lunch.
IBM deserves great credit for getting the ball rolling. But they bailed out long ago. MS, and not Big Blue, has become the icon for the computer revolution.
For better or for worse, I don't think a Gary Kildall - or IBM for that matter - would have had the interest or motivation to see the original OS through as many evolutions and revolutions as it went through. Bill Gates was maniacal that if the company slacked for a moment, someone else was going to eat their lunch.
IBM deserves great credit for getting the ball rolling. But they bailed out long ago. MS, and not Big Blue, has become the icon for the computer revolution.
K2, I don,t doubt for a minute that Bill Gates and Microsoft put a tremendous amount of work into getting to where they are today. I am not even demonizing them. What I was trying to say was that if Bill Gates and Microsoft was not there some other person and/or organization would have stepped up to the plate. Whether they would have done better, worse, or about the same is a moot point. Microsoft and IBM set a lot of the defacto standards in software and hardware respectively. Personally I don,t think any other individual or group could have done any better on the whole.
K2, I don,t doubt for a minute that Bill Gates and Microsoft put a tremendous amount of work into getting to where they are today. I am not even demonizing them. What I was trying to say was that if Bill Gates and Microsoft was not there some other person and/or organization would have stepped up to the plate. Whether they would have done better, worse, or about the same is a moot point. Microsoft and IBM set a lot of the defacto standards in software and hardware respectively. Personally I don,t think any other individual or group could have done any better on the whole.
Sun Microsystems gave away their Openoffice software for free to compete with Microsoft.
There are a number of free web browsers that are given away for free because they can't compete with a web browser that is given away like Internet Explorer. Have you read anything about Mozilla?
Microsoft has had to settle anti-trust suits (hundreds of millions of dollars) from the United States and the EU (maybe billions) and they were forced to open their code and stop being non-competitive.
I even read that Microsoft tried to patent double clicking of the mouse until a judge said, 'no'.
Microsoft thinks they can copyright BASIC even though Berkley invented it.
There were a couple of other BASICs around before MS BASIC, such as Palo Alto Tiny BASIC. A version of that was in ROM in the 4k TRS-80 Model 1. The 16k Model I had MS BASIC in ROM.
I can not help but notice that everyone is overlooking the fact that from the late 70s to the early 90s MS was not that big. There were plenty of competitors. IBM made M$-DOS (AKA Quick and Dirty Operating System) big, and killed CP/M-86. M$ Windows was almost unknown until 1991 (windows 3.0), with GEM being the dominate GUI on the x86 PC/AT, PC/XT, PC and compatibles, there were other systems that had a fair share of the market, with a GUI; the Macintosh by Apple, the Amiga by Amiga (manufactured by Commodore), the Atari ST/STF/STFM/STE/TT/Falcon, the Acorn Archimedes, the Sinclair QL, and a few others. So M$ came into this market purely by marketing of an inferior product to that provided by there competition.
I believe if IBM had put the same price tag on CP/M as they did on PC-DOS when the IBM-PC was introduced that Digital research would have won the war, and we would all be running a modern version of GEM, on our PCs, Macintosh's, Tablets, and Phones.
Sun Microsystems gave away their Openoffice software for free to compete with Microsoft.
There are a number of free web browsers that are given away for free because they can't compete with a web browser that is given away like Internet Explorer. Have you read anything about Mozilla?
I use Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice3 on both my Windows laptop and my Linux netbook. As for Sun giving away their software to compete, that was not always the case. The major reason Sun and others could not compete was that their computers and software were considerably more expensive than the equivalent setup under Windows. Each company also tried to "lock" their customers in to their proprietary hardware and software, making it very difficult for their customers to switch suppliers or use other products that may have fit their application better.
By the time Sun, DEC, and the rest realized their mistake it was too late to do much about it. The x86 based PC had become the defacto standard hardware and Microsoft's operating system and office suite the defacto software standards.
Microsoft has had to settle anti-trust suits (hundreds of millions of dollars) from the United States and the EU (maybe billions) and they were forced to open their code and stop being non-competitive.
True enough. I never said Microsoft was one of the angels or that I like how they behave. This is typical of how large corporations behave if they feel they can get away with it. That's why we need a big 4"x4" to smack them with and make them toe the line.
I even read that Microsoft tried to patent double clicking of the mouse until a judge said, 'no'.
Microsoft thinks they can copyright BASIC even though Berkley invented it.
They are not alone in this. Apple tried the same thing with the mouse even though Xerox developed it at PARC. Same with the concept of windows and icons.
There are plenty of patent and copyright applications for the most mundane and well known concepts and devices. Sadly there are more than enough morons at the patent office who will grant them, and enough idiots on the bench to uphold many of them.
Comments
You guys are forgetting that most of the technology we still used was originally created by them..
Jobs replicated the technology with Apple "Hardware", while Gates realized it could be done with "software".
I suspect it might have been Apple/Xerox instead of Apple/Microsoft -- Apple would have been left at the "clone" maker.
OBC
Actually it is a matter of legend in the computer industry that the last code actually written by Bill Gates was part of the firmware for the Tandy Model 100 portable computer. This was the nearly last gasp of the original project that launched Microsoft, BillG's Basic interpreter for the Altair which became the basis for the Tandy TRS-80 firmware Basic. This would have been around 1981, and in 8085 assembly language.
Incidentally, that Basic interpreter was Smile. It was both slower and bloatier than the Apple ][ Basic interpreter, which tokenized numeric constants as well as keywords, and all of its iterations were buggy as hell and required workarounds with assembly language stored in Pascal strings via POKE to accomplish anything useful.
I think we've benefited from Bill Gates vision, drive, and competitive nature. At the same time, as others have pointed out, the dominance of MS is what fuels all the alternatives. Thank goodness for alternatives! Windows seems to have hit the inner-city blight stage - a victim of its own success.
This is a very good observation, but it can be generalized; like an inner city it has gone through waves of blight and recovery.
DOS 1.x -- I got this instead of CP/M why?
DOS 2.1 -- usable
DOS 3.3 -- pretty darn good
DOS 4.x -- my game won't run!
DOS 5.x -- fixed a lot of what 4.x broke
DOS 6.x -- pretty darn good
Windows 95 -- I got this instead of a Mac why?
Windows 98 -- Hey, now it almost works
Windows 98SE -- pretty darn good
Windows ME -- WTF?
on collision course: Windows 2000 -- works well for what it does, except none of my peripherals work
Windows XP -- pretty darn good
Windows Vista -- Which version do I need again? And WTF?
Windows 7 -- had a chance at pretty darn good but the DRM and version confusion are WTF?
I have no problem admitting that some Microsoft products have been brilliant. But greed gets them in the end every time. There is a tremendous amount of business software out there that runs fine in Windows 7 Pro 32-bit, but simply will not run at all on the default Windows 7 home offered in just about every brick and mortar PC store.
Microsoft recognized the difficulties of programming for a Windows-like environment and came out with Visual Basic, which became the most popular computing language in history because it elegantly provided for RAD in such environments, then they screwed over the authors of billions of lines of code by trying to force them to .NET, which is completely incompatible with VB3/4/5/6 in fundamental ways that in many cases can't be easily fixed, and now there is rumbling that they are fixing to screw over the sheeple who sucked it up and migrated to .NET for the Next Big Incompatible Idea.
Personally, my plan (endorsed by my corporate masters) is that since our in-house customer application needs haven't changed much since we were implementing them on 20 MHz 80286's, that our next generation of customer apps will be implemented with P8X32A-based boxes built by us. All our customers have to know is that it's a turnkey embedded device and if we need a richer user interface than we can get with a Propeller display, there is always the web browser over ethernet.
It took nerves of steel for Microsoft to split with IBM over OS/2, push Windows (pre-3.1), while changing their GUI in a way that would get Apple to sue them. At the time Windows really stunk and I thought Microsoft was digging its grave with it.
@localroger, since Microsoft has abandoned every previous development platform (MFC, COM, ATL, WTL, and WinForms) why should VB and WPF/.Net be any different? To get promoted within MS you probably need to do something new rather than improve what is old. On an aesthetic level I find re-writes to keep up with MS tech churn a waster, but on a purely selfish level re-writes employ programmers which reduces competition for my job.
Well VB brought a lot of people to the koolaid dispenser who had never been there before. At the time (especially ca. VB 3) they were still supporting QuickBasic and Ballmer was yelling "Developers! Developers! Developers!" so if you didn't know the deep background you might think you were hitching to a train that was not scheduled toward a cliff.
Nowadays I use my VB4/6 codebase since Windows (including Win7, with one bugfix) seems to support it, but I am never investing in another Microsoft development system.
The day is not far off when you no longer install an app locally, the vendor, and government if they see fit, can shut you down at any time.
And imagine the wonderful pay-per-use schemes that will arise.
I fear the age of "personal" computing may have been very short lived.
C.W.
It's certainly not just Microsoft that is pushing cloud. I think that other players are pushing it more than they are.
I'm not a cloud fan, either, by the way.
Does anyone really think it would be any better if it were some other company? They are in business to make money, and would not be much if any different than Microsoft. As for trusting "the cloud", thanks, but no thank you. I would not trust a corporation any more than I would a politician. Or a con man, fraud artist, televangelist, or salesman come to think of it.
-Phil
I complain about Microsoft as much as the next person, but I use their software on a daily basis. Overall I would say that compared to some truly nasty companies out there, Microsoft is a saint. There's a local chemical company and an incident in Woburn that comes to mind.
As long as folks know they have to be the ones to protect their data, then there's no issue. (My customers can barely keep an up-to-date antivirus running, so who am I kidding here??!)
The only part of the cloud I don't like is that it is taking ownership of my files. For instance, I got an invite to Google music. Pretty cool. I can play my music anywhere (on any machine) once it's uploaded. Don't see any place to download my music again. Cloud now owns my data if I lose my "originals"
OBC
In my opinion, home and business computers what not be where they are today if Microsoft never existed. In addition to the operating system, you must also consider all the supplemental programs that could be run from that operating system. GUI, Windows, and Microsoft brought us out of the computer dark ages.
In my humble opinion, it would not be more advanced, it would be retarded.
Bruce
The practical issue that I fear is the loss of high powered PC's as a commodity. As more and more computation happens "in the cloud", end users will need less power on their end as they will basically have a terminal.
This is already being driven on the business side with VMWare View and similar systems, the goal is to compute in the data center and deploy terminal devices for the users. I can see the benefit in areas like medical, banking, insurance, etc.
We already have seen the loss of low cost 1920 x 1200 displays due to the overwhelming consumer demand for 1920 x 1080 for HDTV, that's an example of losing the higher end item due to consumer demand going in another direction.
For the average consumer, these changes are probably beneficial, but I think it means having a boat load of computational power on my desktop may be a lot more expensive in the future.
I understand that the cloud as whole may make incredible computing power available at low cost, but users will be at the mercy of providers, and that is not a good thing.
C.W.
For better or for worse, I don't think a Gary Kildall - or IBM for that matter - would have had the interest or motivation to see the original OS through as many evolutions and revolutions as it went through. Bill Gates was maniacal that if the company slacked for a moment, someone else was going to eat their lunch.
IBM deserves great credit for getting the ball rolling. But they bailed out long ago. MS, and not Big Blue, has become the icon for the computer revolution.
K2, I don,t doubt for a minute that Bill Gates and Microsoft put a tremendous amount of work into getting to where they are today. I am not even demonizing them. What I was trying to say was that if Bill Gates and Microsoft was not there some other person and/or organization would have stepped up to the plate. Whether they would have done better, worse, or about the same is a moot point. Microsoft and IBM set a lot of the defacto standards in software and hardware respectively. Personally I don,t think any other individual or group could have done any better on the whole.
Sun Microsystems gave away their Openoffice software for free to compete with Microsoft.
There are a number of free web browsers that are given away for free because they can't compete with a web browser that is given away like Internet Explorer. Have you read anything about Mozilla?
Microsoft has had to settle anti-trust suits (hundreds of millions of dollars) from the United States and the EU (maybe billions) and they were forced to open their code and stop being non-competitive.
I even read that Microsoft tried to patent double clicking of the mouse until a judge said, 'no'.
Microsoft thinks they can copyright BASIC even though Berkley invented it.
You're right. At the time, Gates said he owned Basic and the Dartmouth trustees set him straight.
I can not help but notice that everyone is overlooking the fact that from the late 70s to the early 90s MS was not that big. There were plenty of competitors. IBM made M$-DOS (AKA Quick and Dirty Operating System) big, and killed CP/M-86. M$ Windows was almost unknown until 1991 (windows 3.0), with GEM being the dominate GUI on the x86 PC/AT, PC/XT, PC and compatibles, there were other systems that had a fair share of the market, with a GUI; the Macintosh by Apple, the Amiga by Amiga (manufactured by Commodore), the Atari ST/STF/STFM/STE/TT/Falcon, the Acorn Archimedes, the Sinclair QL, and a few others. So M$ came into this market purely by marketing of an inferior product to that provided by there competition.
I use Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice3 on both my Windows laptop and my Linux netbook. As for Sun giving away their software to compete, that was not always the case. The major reason Sun and others could not compete was that their computers and software were considerably more expensive than the equivalent setup under Windows. Each company also tried to "lock" their customers in to their proprietary hardware and software, making it very difficult for their customers to switch suppliers or use other products that may have fit their application better.
By the time Sun, DEC, and the rest realized their mistake it was too late to do much about it. The x86 based PC had become the defacto standard hardware and Microsoft's operating system and office suite the defacto software standards.
True enough. I never said Microsoft was one of the angels or that I like how they behave. This is typical of how large corporations behave if they feel they can get away with it. That's why we need a big 4"x4" to smack them with and make them toe the line.
They are not alone in this. Apple tried the same thing with the mouse even though Xerox developed it at PARC. Same with the concept of windows and icons.
There are plenty of patent and copyright applications for the most mundane and well known concepts and devices. Sadly there are more than enough morons at the patent office who will grant them, and enough idiots on the bench to uphold many of them.