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Seriously? We launch a gajillion dollar probe, chance it in a sling around the largest planet in our solar system to only save 3 years, and we get black and white photos that have more noise than my cell-phone's camera!?

This is how the first computers looked like. And this is how their "hard drives" looked like.

It was expensive as hell, and the returns were minimal. They dared to do it first, and to improve upon their experience, so today the neighbor kid can whine how he has to wait entire 7 seconds for his physically accurate and photo realistic 3D racing car simulator game to load the entire race track, complete with realistically behaving crowd, plants and atmospheric effects.

NASA reached Pluto with a remotely controlled probe deep in space. You ranted in Slashdot. Congratulations to both for your great achievements.

How Microsoft, a software company, can develop such crappy software while Apple, arguably a hardware company, can develop such good software.

Because Steve Jobs, like him or not, has a hippy/beatnik vision to make computers easier to use. Since after the first Apple was released, money has never been his primary motivation.

Bill Gates on the other hand, has visions of profit. He might even be a confused and unstable person. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/31/162121 0&from=rss

Read "Fire in the Valley" http://www.fireinthevalley.com/ or Accidental Empires
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue145/4_A ccidental_Empires.php sometime.

Enjoy,

For an excellent (and certainly more through) account of the advent of the personal computer you should check out Fire in the Valley by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It's one of those rare non-fiction works that truly engages you in the story. It even includes a copy of the letter Bill Gates wrote about software piracy (c. 1976).

Actually, it was. You see, after Bill's parents (IBM board members) got him his chance, he had only one problem. He DIDN'T HAVE THE OPERATING SYSTEM HE TOLD IBM HE HAD. Got it? He lied.

No matter how slimy somebody is, so long as they are successful they have people who defend them as if using lies, undue influence, and deception

William Gates was waiting in the wings, and he signed a deal to give IBM an operating system.

An engineer, Tim Paterson, at that company had stolen the ideas of CPM/86 and created a cheap clone of it. PC-DOS was that clone

Kildall got nothing and drowned in his own bitterness. In the later years of his life, he drank himself into alcoholism and eventually died in a bar.

GATES: We're responsible for the creation of the PC industry.

For some more information on why this statement is utter bullshit, I recommend Fire in the Valley - The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It is a very in-depth rundown on who did what, when how and why to get the PC where it is today. Hefty book but it's told like a story with interviews and quotes from those that started it - yes including Mr Gates.

Here's a mirror, another blog.

AND... for the real freaks out there who need more than 2 photos, here are two other pics (one, two) from the same day (well, he's wearing the same clothes, anyway; I guess that doesn't mean much), a classic early MS photo (NOT a hoax, despite the domain name), and Billy G's mugshot.

Well... there was the naming computers after fruits phase that made me question Mac users sexuality

Okay, now I think I may have a clearer idea of why you may think of mac users as 'teh ghey', but I stand by my claim that there is NO commonality (sexual, political or otherwise) amongst mac users... except for a ruthless efficiency and fanatical devotion to the pope... But as to the naming of a computer comany after a fruit...has to do mostly with the bizarre dietary habits of Steve Jobs. Now he is the strictest of vegetarians...a VEGAN! The most dreaded strain of vegetarian at all. BUT before Steve-O was a vegetarian of any stripe he was a fruitarian. As far as I understand (I am an Atkins practicioning carnivour, and not a vegetarian or especially a "fruitarian") fruitairians not only eat only fruit...it is prohibited by some sects to eat any fruit that has not dropped naturally to the ground from the vine. NO HAND PICKING or OFF THE DAMN DIRTY HIPPY COMMUNE YOU GO!!! :) Before Jobs started Apple, he lived for a while on a Fruitarian commune in Oregon. Many suppose that it was this experience that lead to the naming of the now famous computer company.

Actually, as I google around, I find this supposedly direct quote:

I was actually a fruitarian at that point in time. I ate only fruit. Now I'm a garbage can like everyone else. And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple.

For those of us under 50, here's some history of the granddaddy of all high-level programming languages.

• [Slightly OT] A BRIEF HISTORY OF FORTRAN/Fortran (very brief)
• Cambridge University Dep't of Engineering's brief history of Fortran

IIRC, my former graduate advisor and professor was on the team that wrote a very early Fortran compilers at MIT in the late 50s, written entirely on punch cards. We've come a long way in ~50 years.

Creative Computing magazine, founded by David Ahl, was one of, if not the first magazine to cover personal computing. It started publishing in 1974 -- "It contained, among other things, computer games written in BASIC. The programs ran on time-shared systems with Teletype machines hooked up to an HP or DEC minicomputer - a typical configuration for the time. " (http://www.uwp.edu/academic/mathematics/usaco/hom e/don.htm)

[aside: you kids haven't lived if you haven't typed the BASIC source for Hunt the Wumpus on a model 33 Teletype and saved it to paper tape!]

Creative also covered hobbyist systems such as the MITS Altair, and when the various home systems started to hit the market, Creative was there to cover Apple, Atari, IBM PC, etc.

Of course, the home systems soon had dedicated magazines -- for the Ataris, there were A.N.A.L.O.G ("Atari Newsletter And Lots Of Games") and Antic. (I've got a closet full of these if anybody wants to purchase some history).

Incidentally, the first issue of Byte was not published until 1975. I can't seem to find a date for the founding of Dr. Dobbs Journal.
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