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B. Gates Rants About Software Copyrights - in 1980
The following is a transcript of the original recording of Dennis Báthory-Kitsz interviewing Bill Gates. This is a behind-the-scenes look at a programmer who's also a writer interviewing a programmer who's also a businessman. The material is unedited. The author had expected a discussion of philosophy and alternative ways of thinking; but the author was nonplused by Gates's emphasis on economic considerations rather than philosophical or legislative ones, or even the excitement that was a strong motivating force throughout the microcomputer community at the time.
This interview, conducted in March 1980, was one of several dozen written and taped exchanges between Báthory-Kitsz and Bill Gates, John Hersey, Bryan Mumford, Hank Watson, P. T. Wolf, and other software authors, computer club members, publishers, program traders, and general users, as well as Sarah Basbas of the Copyright Office.
The final article appeared in 80 Microcomputing, a magazine dedicated to the Radio Shack's TRS-80 Micro Computer System (later known as the Model I). It was the magazine's cover story, Have the Courts Smashed Software Copyright?, in the fall of 1980.
In the interview, the reference to Datacash vs. JS&A is a decision (79 C 591, September 26, 1979) in Illinois District Court that unequivocally held that "the object phase of a computer program was not a 'copy' within meaning of the Copyright Act of 1909 or common law" and "The Copyright Act of 1976 applies to computer programs in their flow chart, source and assembly phases, but not in their object phase." The decision terrified the software community, and was the reason for this article being prepared. CONTU was the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works, which held hearings on the validity of copyright as applied to computer software, and issued a report on July 31, 1978 (SuDocs No. 030-002-0143-8). The heart of the problem was human readability, which CONTU Commissioner John Hersey (author of Hiroshima and president of the Authors League of America) found absent from the "machine part" character of object code. However, in the intervening 20 years, copyright has been extended to computer object code and other material in non-human-readable form, and displayed copyright notices are no longer required.
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, composer and technologist, was - in the halcyon days of small computing - the author of The Custom TRS-80, a best-selling book of hardware and software improvements, and Learning the 6809, a programmed learning text that focused on the Tandy Color Computer. He was president of Green Mountain Micro until its demise in 1986. He presently co-hosts the radio/cyber show Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, writes and edits for The Transitive Empire, and consults in Web site accessibility for OrbitAccess.
Bill Gates was until recently CEO of Microsoft Corporation. Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter in ROM for the TRS-80 (Level II, replacing the rudimentary, non-Microsoft Level I BASIC that was offered in 1977) that was both good enough and flawed enough to make the TRS-80 a hobbyist's dream. A generation of programmers and hardware jockeys were raised on its workings, and the venerable Model I-once called the Trash-80-has recently undergone a resurgence of interest along with other old "eight-bitters."
There is a prefatory exchange before recording begins.
TRANSCRIPT
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz: So you do put a copyright notice in your programs that is displayed on the screen?
Bill Gates: Well, we certainly, um...
B-K: The approach is that, because programs are not in fact protected by the copyright law in magnetic medium, I was wondering about your particular approach to it-your recommendations. The National Commission on the, um, what is the title...
G: CONTU.
B-K: Right, you know about it, okay, good. ...has recommended that, and legislation hasn't been introduced yet on the question.
G: There's no, there's nothing that says it either is or isn't. Unless you take Datacash vs. JS&A as a final determination of the question. There's no answer to whether magnetic media is presently protected by the copyright laws.
B-K: Well, on the Section 117, it specifically excludes from...
G: No it does not. It says that this law, the new copyright law, does not change in any way the degree to which the copyright laws cover such items. It leaves it totally open. There's nothing that explicitly, unless I'm mistaken, that closes that question.
B-K: One of the points of CONTU was because it did in fact exclude that. That was what the Commission was trying to approach and get at-revisions to the law that would definitely include such things, including ROMs, and other matters which are not currently covered by the law.
G: Okay, I was involved in the CONTU thing, and let me explain what I understand about that. Specifically in the new copyright law, there is a section that says this law is not intended to change in any way the degree to which copyright laws cover ROMs, magnetic media, diskettes, other forms of software programs, and that Congress will appoint a commission to look into this issue. We're not changing it in any way, shape, or form. So CONTU comes directly from that provision, okay, and they're supposed to recommend to Congress how to treat those things explicitly. There's never been a statement of any kind that says that the copyright laws don't cover magnetic media. There's now Datacash vs. JS&A which says that it's in machine-readable form only, and therefore wouldn't be subject to a copyright, if that's the way you read Datacash vs. JS&A. It's now an Illinois District Court decision. It has a lot of people very upset. But there's cert... As far as I'm aware, there's nothing that eliminates that. I mean, every manufacturer around, Digital Equipment puts copyright notices on, we put copyright notices on. Also, on most of our software packages, we require a non-disclosure agreement from the user before they can use it. B-K: Right, that is an agreement of another nature. However, a person obtaining a copy of yours outside of the agreement, through any source... Now again, you're interpreting it, apparently, from a point of view different from that taken by the Commission, because the Commission, specifically Hersey's dissent...
G: What about Hershey's [sic] dissent? That's something I spent a lot of time on.
B-K: Oh, you did? I had written to him recently, and got a letter in which he specifically analogizes it to the actions of cams and other devices.
G: That's what he thinks!
B-K: Yes, indeed.
G: Hershey was just way off in left field as far as the Commission?s concerned! He takes this thing that we're dehumanizing society by protecting our work, you know, that everybody should be... that somehow if people can feel mechanistic things, then society is a little more human.
B-K: It seemed to me that Hersey's point was - I didn't agree with him - mostly from the viewpoint that he seemed to be trying to protect the works of the traditional author as he viewed them. And I myself write extensive machine language programming, do a lot of that, and sort of resented that point of view personally. But, it seemed to me, again, I'm going from the point of view that the Commission would not have been necessary if the law was clear enough to cover those sorts of things, the format...
G: The law is not clear at all, and the Commission was set up specifically by a provision of the law. I'm talking about... I can go get my file on this stuff, which is about eight inches thick, and read to you that portion of the law.
B-K: Yeah, I have it in front of me at the moment.
G: It does not say that the copyright laws do not cover magnetic media.
B-K: The copyright laws do cover magnetic media, but not computer programming magnetic media.
G: No, it doesn't say that either.
B-K: Okay, what I'm looking for is not a discussion of that so much as your opinion of the current situation in regard to this. How do you feel about it? Or do you...
G: Well, we spend millions of dollars a year creating software programs, and we are protecting those in several ways. There's the trade secret laws where we get non-disclosure, and that's how we handle our source codes and our so-called commercial packages that are high priced. But for our low-cost software, we simply can't do that. Like the things... We have that consumer products division that sells things selling for less than $100. We can't afford to go out there and get non-disclosures on those things. So we rely on the copyright laws.
B-K: You haven't had an occasion to test the law? Your organization, specifically?
G: There is no case testing the law, unless you consider the Datacash vs. JS&A such a case. Everybody relies on unfair competition laws, which are just fine. If you have somebody going out using your work, and selling it, then the unfair competition laws come in, or there's laws for instance in the State of California, that were enacted to protect cassette tape rip-off, and those have been used, and unfair trade practices have been used, but as far as the copyright law, no, nobody's ever...
B-K: What about modifications? Minor modifications to programs and reorganization, and then re-issuance? How do you feel about that? There are rumors, which you probably have more reliable information on, about the copies of machines like the TRS-80 to appear using essentially your writing of Level II. How do you feel about a minor rewrite of all of your work? And how do you think you would approach that if such a machine were in fact to appear?
G: Well, you must be talking about the EACA machine, which is a Hong Kong company that's coming in and licensed our BASIC.
B-K: They have licensed it from you?
G: Certainly.
B-K: Okay, I was not aware...
G: If they didn't license the BASIC... I mean, the unfair trade laws protect us there 100%, you know. That has nothing to do with the copyright thing. There you have somebody who is using another person's work.
B-K: How can it be proven that it is in fact your work?
G: How can it be proven that it's my work? I'll get, you know, any number of experts to testify that it's my work. It's quite simple. It's proof in a court of law.
B-K: What evidence is there within the context of the work that you would consider enough evidence? In other words, we are dealing with a group of machine instructions, which could be, like a bibliography, could be also arranged in an order that would produce a certain series of effects. What is distinctive...
G: You?re talking about a thing that is 16,000 instructions with 256 possibilities for each one. I can certainly prove if it's derived from my work that it's derived from my work. It's just like any form of plagarism [sic] where, you know, you can modify musical tunes. There's nothing novel about this. If you change the page numbers on a book, or if you translate a book, or if you rip off somebody's musical tune, the court has to determine, was it in fact borrowing from the previous work, and in the case of software, they'd rely on expert testimony.
B-K: In other words, from your point of view, there is nothing difficult at all about the question?
G: Well, you have to have exp... You know, if somebody's camouflaged the thing pretty well... That's a question of fact, not of law. The question is, did they borrow from my work, okay? Assume that I can prove that, that I could convince the court that they borrowed from my work, then you have the question of law, what's the law going to do about that. Okay, when somebody's commercializing a machine based on my product and earning money from it, that's unfair competition, when they haven't licensed it from me. That's ignoring the copyright law. The thing the copyright laws are really necessary for is where you have people exchange the software essentially on a free basis with each other, say inside a computer club or, you know, people there are saying, here, take a video tape or things. That's where copyright laws have to come in and say, "Is this a legitimate use?"
B-K: Or if someone were merely to take your material, and from their point of view, a gesture of humanitarianism to users who couldn't afford it, to give it away to them...
G: Just like you go to a bank, and as a gesture of humanitarianism, you take their money and you give it away! That's a gesture of humanitarianism! In society, we don't need to pay... If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
B-K: Okay, in such a situation, how would you approach, if, say, major computer club like a Cleveland group or a Chicago group decided they had had it with paying what they considered a high price and started giving away your material publicly? How would you approach that?
G: Well, they put, they put software companies out of business, okay? If the law wasn't going to protect it, there wouldn't be any software written. I mean, it's just like, if somebody... What would an author do if everybody starts giving away their book, or anything?
B-K: There's a clear protection...
G: Take them to court and see if the courts are willing to protect the work that we've done.
B-K: Okay, do you think you?d be successful?
G: Oh, absolutely! I mean, you've got to realize that the courts are basically looking for equity solutions, and when you have somebody creating a work, and putting a lot of effort into that, and you have somebody else who is giving it away, the court is looking for the equity of the situation.
B-K: What piece of law would they base it on?
G: Oh, they'd generally use unfair trade practices, unfair competition.
B-K: But neither of those cases are legitimate here, because there is no profit being made.
G: Well, it's things like the AP wire, where there were people giving away AP wire stuff, and AP wire can't be copyrighted because it's simply news material, and I forget how they handled it in that case, but... Well, they'd probably look into state law to see what they could get. I mean, you know, if you have somebody running advertisements and distributing media, they're probably going to have to charge some money, in which case you can definitely get all those laws into play. Also, if it's something requires non-disclosure, which is true for most of our packages, everything but super low-end stuff and [inaudible] stuff, like Typing Tutor, then we've got a trade secret case against them.
B-K: Once you've gotten past the first step of non-disclosure, you may have a case against the initial person, however...
G: But if a trade secret's released, the people are taking advantage of a trade secret are subject to a penalty. It's not like you can just go in and rip someone off, and they can't figure out who it is, you can use the thing freely. That's not the way trade secrets work.
B-K: If that's the case, then why do you license it?
G: Why do I license it? So I can get coverage under the trade secret law.
B-K: I'm looking for a conflict there somehow.
G: You don't get trade secret protection unless you have a specific agreement with the party not to disclose. But you can have, if you prove it's a trade secret, for anybody who's using it.
B-K: Even those with whom you do not have a specific agreement?
G: That's right. It's a trade secret. If you prove that the thing has never been published, and you've covered it under those agreements, then anybody who is benefiting by it suffers. Otherwise the thing is so ludicrous. What do you think the trade secret... What good would the trade secret laws be?
B-K: In the trade secret laws as I had understood them, that was generally material that was not accessible. The process...
G: No, ours is not accessible except by non-disclosure. That's what trade secrets are for.
B-K: No, that's not what I was saying. I was saying that the material, the process of operation, or one aspect of it was not discernible...
B-K: ...and that it requires some covert act to obtain the balance of information. In the case of your code, the code is all. There is no secret beyond that.
G: I really don't know what you?re saying at all. Our code is the trade secret, and people who are...
B-K: But you're giving it way.
G: No, we're not giving it away, we're selling it. Just like Coca-Cola. The bottling companies make the Coke, okay? The overseas affiliates make the syrup, okay? They license it to those people They're just like people signing our non-disclosure. Or, you know, Dow Chemical has a process for making ethylene. They license it to people. It's a trade secret. Those people who have that process pay.
B-K: That's right, yeah.
G: They sign the non-disclosure, just like people who receive our software sign our non-disclosure. Okay?
B-K: And if the material is taken, modified so that it's still structurally similar, and then re..., and then given away at that point? Do you think that has been clarified?
G: Absolutely! I mean, when you're talking about a chemical process, what is an exact duplicate of the chemical process? There have been plenty of cases where you come in and you have a question of fact: Is this... Did somebody else use somebody's... Did they use proprietary information of this company to come up with this process? And that's a question of fact. You have experts come in. Once again, you've got to separate these things out; don't confuse questions of fact with questions of law. First, you decide if you've used somebody else's work. Then you decided if the law protects it. If it's a trade secret, they've received non-disclosure, fine, the law protects it.
B-K: Why, then, was the Commission necessary?
G: Because there are certain things that are not suitable for covering under, covering with trade secret protection. You don't want to go out for every $14 piece of software you sell, get a non-disclosure agreement from the guy. That's bad news. Okay, you don't want, when you sell a TRS-80, to have to have the guy sign a non-disclosure agreement that he won't screw with the ROM. Okay? For things that are going to have widespread distribution, the copyright laws are certainly more appropriate, and yet, the copyright laws, there's nothing clear in them about how they would handle something that's not human-readable. It's not clear that they don't, I mean, certainly when you have tape... everything in a form is human-readable, just like you can disassemble binary bits, you can take a magnetic tape with voice on it and play it back on a recorder, and certainly cassette tapes are protected.
B-K: Um, okay.
G: It's a matter of degree. If they want to set up some procedures, some clear boundaries, of what was and wasn't protected, because nobody's willing to pay the cost. I couldn't afford that kind of pioneering effort, taking something like that to court. I'd be out of business.
B-K: What... Would you favor, then, the specific extension of the copyright law, in specific language, to cover...
G: Making it clear that the copyright laws covered, yes.
B-K: Yeah, you would.
G: Not an extension! It is not an extension!
B-K: Well, some people do feel that it is...
G: Who?
B-K: ...and Hersey's pretty clear...
G: Who?
B-K: ...that he does feel that way...
G: Who?
B-K: ...so it's not a manner of unanimous...
G: Does he have a court decision or something interpreting the law? Or does he see, or is there some provision in the law? I mean, look at the thing which commissioned CONTU to start with. Okay, I can go pull it out. It doesn't say that the laws don't cover these things. It says that they've been asked to come up with a clear position clarifying the exact procedure. And in particular in the case of databases that's tough. CONTU had a very broad scope.
B-K: Then why, as of four weeks ago, had the Copyright Office not accepted any software in magnetic media for copyright?
G: It doesn't really matter. I mean, when cassette tapes come in, they actually deliver them. They don't deliver a cassette tape on the thing, they deliver like a musical sheet rendition or something like that.
B-K: I'm not talking about the printed version, which is acceptable, but the magnetic version, which is not.
G: Are you telling me music cassette tapes are not protected?
B-K: No, I didn't say music. I was talking about computer programs on cassette tape. Music is specifically protected by the law.
G: Why? It's not in human readable form. It's on a cassette.
B-K: Well, I'm not asking you for an interpretation. I'm stating that as of four weeks ago, they had not yet accepted them. If the law to your mind makes them acceptable, why does the Copyright Office, the Registrar of Copyright, still refuse to accept magnetic media and ROM?
G: For the same reason they don't take music cassettes. They want to see the thing in the most human-readable...
B-K: It's the phonogram copyright and it does in fact copyright the musical version.
G: Well, they want to see the thing in the most human-readable form, so people have submitted tons and tons of source code to the thing to the Copyright Office and received copyright registrations. Just like in the Datacash vs. JS&A.
B-K: The office is specifically excluding magnetic media. They still continue to. I want you to address that question if you would - that of magnetic media. You have said the law does protect the programs, and the specific question of the law was whether it protected them in magnetic media and in ROMs, and whenever it was in the machine.
G: The medium is not really the issue...
B-K: The medium is in fact an issue.
G: The Copyright Office wants to see something they can understand. If you put a computer program on magnetic media, they have a hard time knowing what they are copyrighting. They have no way of comparing things, or doing a search, or anything of that nature. They're really unequipped for it, okay, and they want a clear mandate that they should be equipped for that, and then they'll go out and spend a bunch of money. So they want it, right now, they want to see the thing in listing form.
B-K: And, as contrasted with recorded discs and tapes, the magnetic media and the ROMs they are refusing to accept. So you would favor this extension? This is what I am trying to get at. It is in fact from the Copyright Office's point of view an extension of the law.
G: Well, what the Copyright Office does... You know, they should be equipped to accept it in that form, well we can certainly deliver it to them in other forms. Like initially, they weren't equipped to receive video material in VTR form, or they're not equipped to receive it in video disc format, and they definitely should get a setup to do that.
B-K: But it's definitely copyrightable under the phonogram copyright and magnetic media as long as it is not a digitally rendered piece of information, which they are not accepting...
G: There is tons of... I'm sorry?
B-K: Which, as I say, the digital program they are not accepting, yet they are accepting by contrast a digital recording of audio material. That is an interesting contrast. I had asked them of that, and they said yes, they are accepting digital masters, but they are not accepting computer programs.
G: What if I put my source code on that?
B-K: Yes.
G: I put the characters in perfectly readable human form? They'll accept that.
B-K: They will not.
G: No, the problem is object code vs. source code.
B-K: The problem is a machine-readable code.
G: Well, wait a minute. The VTR is a machine; a cassette tape recorder is a machine.
B-K: They made the differentiation. I haven't made it. They have apparently made it.
G: Okay, in a sense that only a machine can execute it, yeah. They have not accepted object code for copyright as far as I'm aware.
B-K: They have not. That is correct.
G: I know some people who have sent in paper tape object codes and they weren't rejected, but that doesn't really prove anything that they have them sitting in their vaults.
B-K: If they issue the copyright certificate for that piece of material in that form, which they have not done. They have issued it for listings, they have issued it for other forms, but not that which sits in either of those two, and I was trying to get at that. Would you like to make any generalized comments about your experiences with your smaller software, and the violation of any rights that you see that you have there? The smaller pieces, those less than $100 that you were talking about earlier?
G: Well, you know, people... When it's more convenient to get it from your friend than it is to go out and buy the thing, both from a cost and a speed of delivery point of view, there's a great temptation to copy it, and that does take place. Fortunately, there's a great number of people who are honest enough, who realize the effect of that type of stuff, and come and purchase the package. And, you know, as... That's really what determines whether people will come up with software packages.
B-K: Would you like to address some comments to a generalized public, as, I would say, probably the acknowledged leader of the microcomputer software industry?
G: Well, as far as the whole rip-off issue, unfortunately, it gets... The trade is something totally different than what it is. It's simply a matter of... It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of. There are people who would like to stay in business and earn a salary writing packages for these low-cost computers, but... And every time somebody comes up with a scheme for making it difficult to protect, there's a great deal of unhappiness expressed on the part of the user, because they want to be able to make the duplicate copies.
B-K: Yeah, absolutely. I sympathize with that, from my point of view, because I have ruined enough of my original copies of things because I'm terribly klutzy about such things.
G: There's too many people out there who are willing to just exchange the stuff, are willing to go to a club meeting and see that stuff being done without speaking out against it.
B-K: Absolutely. I've received in a survey that I was doing of users from my own personal mailing list, a list, a photocopied list of over 120 pieces of commercial software that one individual was trading, offering for trade, most of which he had gotten in trade. And I was really unhappy about that. I'm trying to be objective about my point of view on the article, but I really hit the ceiling when I saw it. I said to myself, what do I write to this guy, what do I say to this guy to say, you know, "Would you stop? Maybe it doesn't seem like a big deal, but you've got 120 programs, and some of them are phenomenally big programs that the authors, who sweated their asses off for this thing, have not seen any compensation for." But it's pretty extensive. I don't know how much of it you see. You probably see a lot of it, but maybe people are wary of telling you, but it's tremendously extensive.
G: There's a great deal of it. But I, looking at the thing, and with the amount of software we offer, we are the most ripped-off company around in this [inaudible]. It's because we offer a broad range, and we try to offer it for these low-cost computers.
B-K: Absolutely. And there's probably where you're getting the greatest portion of your loss.
G: And we view this thing totally as an experiment. If there isn't enough, if there aren't enough honest people out there to buy the stuff, we'll end it. And we won't... At least, most of our packages we won't put down at the low end.
B-K: Okay. Your experiment has been successful so far, I take it from something you said earlier. You felt that there are enough honest people out there.
G: Yeah, I really think there are. And it's not, it's not overwhelmingly acceptable, but it's at an acceptable level where, as the base of personal computer users grows, and we come up with... I think people will have a growing awareness that it's just taking someone else's work is not the appropriate way to handle it.
B-K: As a related question - you can tell me to stop at any time as it gets toward, or maybe it's past your lunch hour - but as just one related question. I'll probably make it my final one. We've heard a lot of feedback from readers about wishing that Microsoft and Radio Shack in this particular case could possibly make available some more, a lot of detail about the ROM. People feel helpless trying to take it apart bit by bit, spending months doing that so they can essentially write a simple routine to patch into it for their own use. How do you feel about the obligation one reader particularly expressed that the, more details should be made available about, particularly, large-scale works like Level II ROM?
G: Well, if there's a problem with Level II ROM, people can work with Radio Shack. They have their own support team.
B-K: Well, Radio Shack apparently doesn't know very much about it, or is not willing to talk about it. They have not answered...
G: The Level II ROM operates as documented in the manual, and they're perfectly willing to talk about that. As far as whether PMOS was used, and whether the third layer of the Z-80 chip has...
B-K: I'm talking about the software specifically.
G: Why is that an area of such interest? Why don't they demand that the circuit diagrams for the Z-80 chip be included then? All that stuff be documented? I mean, they bought the box for one function, and the price was set to support them.
B-K: Maybe they didn't buy the box for one function.
G: Well, if they got it to get the source code of the ROM, then somebody misled them.
B-K: Don't misapprehend my question. I'm saying that there are a lot of places, and I myself have had the difficulty of wanting to perform a certain transparent function that I could use all the time for my particular orientation, which is as a composer, and I need some special activities which I would like to patch into place. It's taken me an extraordinary amount of time to find how those patch points operated, the timings of them, etc., for my own use. I do not have personally the cash to go out and buy a $10,000 controller. I needed an inexpensive machine onto which I could expand with my main interest, which is composition - which is not computer hardware.
G: Well, a great deal of information about that ROM has been made available.
B-K: Through what sources?
G: Through Radio Shack. They tell you where, they tell you certain things about the entry points and what the device parameters are. Beyond that, do you know what kind of support burden you create by trying to explain to everybody what's in that ROM? Not to mention the fact that that ROM, the source code that's in there is what keeps us in business.
B-K: That's true, but do you see as likely that someone is going to copy that when it is so inexpensive?
G: To copy the ROM?
B-K: Yeah.
G: It isn't inexpensive to copy the ROM.
B-K: What I'm saying is, it's so inexpensive for the device as a whole. Nobody's going to build a TRS-80 from the ground up.
G: That's true. Well, if they want. If they want to know every last bit and byte in the thing and they for some reason which I guess I...
B-K: The reason I'm trying to express is, I have found three or four routines which I've found essential to my use, and it took me a long time to find out how the various interpreter sections worked so that I could patch it in completely transparently, do other things, and go into it without having to completely bypass it, to not use it at all. A lot of the convenience functions I wanted, but I didn't, there were a lot of things it didn't have that I wanted to add to it. A lot of people have expressed to me, why aren't the patch points, that whole row, that whole, virtually, page of patch points explained?...
G: Well, the reason...
B-K: ...That kind of support?
G: We put flexibility into the ROM which isn't documented at all, and which is not sold as a feature on the thing. Radio Shack doesn't have the expertise or the money to go out and explain to their users how to work with that stuff at the machine-language level. The support burden would just be unbelievable. I mean, they would virtually have to hire experts to answer the phone and spend hours educating people about machine language, about the stack, about interrupts, about how it works together, about the problems with hardware interface, and explain it to me and my eight-year-old son. [tape side 1 ends; discussion about clones missed] You know, I assume they're not offering the same type of support that Radio Shack would on the thing. Fixing mistakes, and coming up with new versions, fixing the thing, and also the fact that you have to go and buy the thing from a club or something like that, it's very clear what the rules of use are, and I don't see why Radio Shack should do that. Do you think a lot more people would buy the computer, or that they've misrepresented the computer?
B-K: No, I don't think anyone's said that. I think people are anxious, are very anxious for additional information about what they have. You can order, for example, a manual, a repair and service manual...
G: Yeah, on a hardware level, they've done a good job.
B-K: ...no I mean, for an automobile, for example, you can order a detailed manual about all the aspects of it, how to tune it up, and keep it in good operating condition, buy you cannot...
G: Yeah, that's true. There is a thing called the TRS-80 Technical Manual. From a hardware point of view, they've done a good job.
B-K: That's from a hardware point of view.
G: Well, the software's just... B-K: But there's no software technical manual?
G: Well, there's two issues there. One is the complexity of it, and two is the issue of protecting what we own, and what we do business with. I think, you know, there's a gap there. More information should be made available by Radio Shack, and they would have to come to me and say, "Is this too much?" Because of the way our contracts work, they can't really release anything without my permission. There's a certain amount that could be, that would aid people in their use of the ROM without threatening my proprietary rights. If Radio Shack's emphasis was to do a good job supporting hobbyist-type users, and people who were interested in that sort of thing, they would do that. They'd go out and write a book. As it is, the people who are doing this thing have to be careful, because they tread the line of violating my copyright. Like, oh, [Harvard C.] Pennington coming out with his thing [TRS-80 Disk & Other Mysteries]. He's putting comments in.
B-K: Right, right. There's a TRS... I don't know if you've seen it - the TRS-80 Disassembled Handbook, which is a piece of work in which a person deciphered a large number of your subroutine calls, and provides virtually all of your code in hex, with the exception of a few bytes, which he says that he's taken out to make sure that the person bought the product. How do you react to something like that?
G: He's got our code in hex?
B-K: Your entire code in hex less maybe about two dozen bytes that he took out specifically to say that he didn't want to violate your rights by providing the whole code.
G: Well, he certainly violated our rights!
B-K: Okay. If you're interested, there's a review in the upcoming issue of 80 Microcomputing, and it has the address, and you might want to talk to him, because he feels he has not...
G: Certainly he has. I mean, that's my material. Whose does he think it is? Does he think that he has the right to go out and commercially profit by republishing something that we created? I mean, that's ludicrous! You know, why should he be making money from that? All he did was take our stuff!
B-K: Okay, in the level of your support, then, do you feel that giving detailed information about what you've doing violates your rights?
G: No. No, like the thing with Pennington where he gives comments, that doesn't violate my rights, because he did not include any portion of the ROM itself. You know, it kind of encourages people to run the disassembler, and as long as they use it for their personal use, okay, that's fair use. It might make it easier for someone who had something bad in mind... But that's fine; what Pennington has done is okay. [Later that year Pennington published Microsoft BASIC Decoded with a complete source listing.] But if this guy actually included the contents of the ROM in his book, he's crossed the line. That's our material!
B-K: Okay, I would be interested, if you had any contact with him, I would very much be interested in hearing something further on that, because I thought that it was a little out of line personally.
G: Okay, I have to go.
B-K: Thank you very much.
G: Nice talking to you.
-----------------------
For a truly strange audio experience, check out Dennis's MP3.com page. The piece titled No Money (Lullaby for Bill) is made entirely of audio clips from the above interview.
Or you can download the entire original interview in either RealAudio or MP3 format from this special Geeks in Space page. Be forewarned: it's almost 40 minutes long, and it's a 19-year-old, low-quality recording.
I have about 5 years of NT experience.
Ok, I can do math (opens calculator). 1995. Got it.
I started using it to solve real-world business problems before a huge portion of the IT community even knew it existed.
Oh puh-leeaze. Are you saying a huge portion of the IT community had never heard of NT 3.51? I don't buy that. FWIW, some of us who where in IT in 1995 still regard NT 3.51 as "The NT that sucked less". Throughout 1994, programmers were bombarded with articles on programming Win32 -- the brave new world of 32-bit programming in Windows.
(All of this is disregarding the fact that the original post was tongue-in-cheek. Have I been trolled if I respond to a reponse to a troll?)
I would never compare Bill to the Devil
Insulting the Devil is bad Karma.
MACHINE clones. (Like the IBM clones.)
Very good point - MODERATE THIS COMMENT UP.
Thans
Munky_v2
Your interest in the anti-American and anti-Christian institution of monarchy disgusts me as it must disgust all FREE MEN, but at least your heart's in the right place WRT operating systems.
Anybody who remembers the 1980's, knows that the liberals like to half-reveal their intent (to those who have understanding) behind clever acronyms which have an outward significance as well as an inward significance. The Satanist heavy-metal band "WASP", for example, had two occult interpretations, both understood only by those "in the know": "We Are Sexual Perverts" was one, and the other was "Weak Arguments in Support of Patriarchalism". The music and public persona of "WASP" were designed by the liberal inner circle to discredit decent Biblical family values by presenting a childish reductio ad absurdum of healthy heterosexual masculinity. Such an agenda is enough in and of itself to define its perpetrators as "sexual perverts", although we can safely assume that they also engaged in numerous other and more concrete perversions. It all fits together far too well to be a coincidence, even if it weren't for irrefutable documentation in the form of record industry memos which have been brought to light at great risk.
In view of the above, it's obvious that "BSD" represents just what its "DEVIL" logo would suggest: This is a group of software developers who consider themselves to be "BONDED SERVANTS of the DEVIL". And they want to share that fact with others of their ilk. The world is full of occult or "shrouded" communication in this form and other, similar forms. Most Americans are blissfully unaware that the liberals are conspiring all around them, but we must make ourselves aware, at any cost. It's far better to guess wrong from time to time in one's interepretations than to run the risk of remaining in the dark.
Now, the saddest fact of all is that monarchy is an essentially liberal form of government, yet the fool to whom I reply has mistakenly associated it with the powerful anti-liberal, pro-freedom forces of Microsoft. Microsoft is organized on a feudal basis because it is a corporation, not a government. For a corporation, this kind of organization is entirely appropriate. This has nothing whatsoever to do with conventional conceptions of the nature of monarchy. Worldy governments must be organized on strict principles of freedom and equal rights, such that only those who have demonstrated the greatest ability (by creating and amassing wealth) are permitted to control the destiny of a godly nation.
Ha, ha, ha, well done :) I can just imagine all of the people who replied to your post sitting in front of their PCs, chewing on their lips and slowly going purple in outrage!
Yay! I guess slashdot is becoming .... news for history buffs. I am getting sick and tired of the personal tirades against Bill Gates. I don't know Bill Gates as a person. The only part I know is the software, so how can people continue to rant against the Company ? Answer: By blending in their dislike for the person. This is a sad state of affairs but only reflects the current culture that neglects respect for individuals.
That Torvalds joke is funny right now...
Certainly doesn't sell MS products....
Microware OS9 managed to get preemptive multitasking and a bunch of other unix-type stuff in a 4K microkernel. Very cool system.
Here's a short list of some of the problems I encounter regularly with the servers.
Why don't you SHARE with us a recent version of the slashdot source code? Could it be because you WANT to restrict access to the code?
Please.
Windows NT not 100% 32-bit? That's like saying that Linux isn't 100% 32-bit because Wine and DOSEMU can run 16-bit apps. Windows NT IS 100% 32-bit; it has an emulation layer called WOW (for Windows on Windows) that allows Win16 apps to be run in a Win32 context. Win9x lacks WOW and 16-bit apps are still supported by legacy 16-bit code inside the system DLL's.
No kidding. This thread is like the energizer bunny... I'll second that nomination...
And here's me thinking we were an anarcho-syndicitalist commune. Who voted for him anyway?
You made me blow coffee out my nose! That hurt!
From my reading of business history, much of the success retrospectively attributed to business people is persistence. A concomitant ATTRIBUTION by third parties is that this condition is brought about by arrogance.
He defended the need to recover expenses to make a profit very well; unfortunately, he sidesteped every question about where users should have the ability to change the software or use detailed documentation to help solve problems that are unique from the intended masses. The interviewer cited he was a composer and wished to make use of timed calls into the software so he could use his computer more productively, rather than buying some $10,000 instrument. Bill Gates would never compromise with his argument of intellectual property and pushed for laws to the extreme to protect it. Now we have stupid software patents because of the likes of him.
billy seems like an unhappy person. he'd like life a lot better if he poured hot grits down his pants. thank you.
...because with wise-ass comments like that, you might start making Slashdot fun again!
Maybe the REAL reason is that OPEN SOURCE DOES NOT CREATE BETTER PROGRAMS. For the most part it hasn't!
A notable exception is Apache, but that is not due to its Open Sourceness, it is more that web serving is a relatively simple operation and Apache got there first.
If the point was valid, it would get a little
more respect. You degrade your point even
further by indicating your seriously
misguided belief that NT is more reliable than
VMS.
Here's an excerpt from something on deja.com:
> At the 20th anniversary DECUS (DEC user society
> - (open)VMS for Alpha and VAX) meeting (in
> November, 1997), the theme was, among other
> things, the reliability
> of the VMS operating system. (One of the demos
> was taking an original VAX 11/780
> (circa 1977), setting the system clock to the
> year 2003, and watching it run all week).
> On the other end of the floor were some
> just-out-of-the-box Alpha 8400's doing the
> same thing, but doing it a few thousand times
> faster.
> Some guy shuffled up to the microphone and
> said his ancient VAX had last been
> booted sometime in early 1983, making for over
> 14 years without a reboot. At the
> time of that meeting, it was still going.
> He said it was running VMS V3.something and was
> being used to run an automated plumbing system
> for an electrical plant.
There are many such testimonials. Your Intel
CPU's have ancient VAXen running VMS to thank
for their existence, the FABs are run with
the things. So are their mail servers (last time
I got a message from Intel, anyway).
I'd agree NT is not a rehash of VMS, since Cutler
was only around for ~1.0 of VMS. It got much
better around V3 (Now at 7.2). (Just wait for
Galactic Clusters for some real technology!)
Sheesh, does no one recognize attempts at humor anymore?
There is a fundamental difference between charging for a software license (which is what Microsoft does), and charging for the time and effort required to develop a piece of software (which is what you will be doing after graduation). You're right, designing software is indeed a service: But MS is charging for it as if it were a product.
He said sit down and have a nice cup of hot chocolate. He didn't say anything about taking a bath.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Yesterday makes tomorrow possible. One thing that seperates humans from animals is we don't just live in the moment.
This must be Julian the Geek Jock. Am I right?
dude, wasp sucked.
i always liked "lavendar sloth" a lot better. they had some good tunes. "mirror mirror on the ceiling" was great, and that throbbing techno version of "hava nagilah" gave me the chills every time too. but dude, wasp was just lame. they didn't have any good songs at all. it was just all the same rehashed shit over and over, you know??
from the Simpsons. that episode was on last night in this part of town.
This thread is like the energizer bunny...
That's the best thing I've heard here in ages... :)
But MS put them all together into one OS. Unless you like to use 3 or 4 different OS's?
What in the world is wrong with charging for software? We are in a capitalist society. You see, we exchange money for goods and services. Designing software is a service in my opinion. I'm a computer science student at a major american university, and I hope to be able to pay for food and shelter after I graduate.
netscape is right after microsoft
Actually, some places don't even want his gifts because of who he is. The University of Victoria recently refused his money; I forget exactly what their reasons were. (I'd submitted the Glode and Mail link to ./ but it didn't make the cut.)
Everybody knows you're full of shit.
Bill gates is the devil and your an ass.
You are a pimp dude. Open source, quite possible could end the Gates era. But, I have never once heard him tear down the Open Source community.
So is dung on a painting of the Virgin Mary or a crucifix in a glass of urine. It doesn't mean it has value.
... flawed ... than others.
;)
All art has value, trolling is like anti-art -- specifically designed to upset complancency. As I said, it's an artform - some works are more
IMHO, Trolling is one of the true innovations of the internet.
ps, someone assumed I was the original poster, this assumption is incorrect -- for all I know, they were really that clueless
You are SOOOOOOOO full of shit!
Bill Gates: "Dennis... Dennis.. I AM your father!
Dennis: "NOOOOOOOOOOOoooooo!!!!
It would be nice if you could back this up w/ some credible source.
I pity the man who's biggest dream is to write device drivers for Linux.
"In the land of the Eunichs the needle-dicked Dennis is king"
>Jobs tried to limit the first Mac to 64k because >he really did think that was enough for real >coders, and giving anyone more would lead to sloppy code. hahah.. maybe he was right.. :) take a look at how bloated windows is...
Based on a quick reading of the interview, I'd agree with this. However, the additional information available in the audio version (tone of voice, etc) renders this less true.
While I won't debate slippery issues like "quality", I will point out a few historical errors: Win'95 does not have true preemptive multitasking, nor was it the first desktop OS to have the "semicooperative" multitasking that it does have. Unix had true preemptive multitasking around the time PCs were first made. Macs had cooperative multitasking (make an explicit call to switch context) when they first came out ('84?) and Amigas had "semicooperative" (a context switch will be forced most of the time) when they first came out ('85?). Win'95 was, in other words, ten years behind the Amiga.
Unix had virtual memory long before Winduhs did, too. Again I don't know exactly when, but I was using it in '86, so it's likely at least ten years ahead of Winduhs again.
I don't know if I want to say BSD was a pioneer in portability, but it was ported to the 386 long before NT was thought of. Look at NetBSD if you want to see an OS that runs on a lot of processors.
"Something that had never been done before in the industry" - that's a real hoot. The only way to make it so is to define "the industry" as "what M$ makes"
Oh yeah right, Bungholio. We are SOOO impressed with your boundless integrity.
Bill Gates surely debated how he get away with it with his lawyer Dad. He was raised in a house of law with many law books lying around. It's not Bill Gates the businessman, it's Bill Gates the lawyer and programmer. The interview clearly shows this. You want something protected? You call a lawyer/Policeman/Gangster/Gun/church members/gun dealers/Friends who can fight/Private army/body gaurds -- doesn't matter if you are a billionaire or an African rebel leader. If that protection involves money/dope/women/religious creeds/something you make/status/personal power it becomes treacherous and a less humane act-- arrests/imprisonment/banishments/executions become justifiable-- all is necessary is "proof" as it is defined by the local government. It's the same all over the world. Why do you think any of these people give money to charity? Taxes and government coercion coupled with a small schizophrenic shred of quasi-Judeo-Christian guilt/better society ethos. The guy had it down pat from the very beginning. Problem is, it caught up with him.
Hey, I know a funny anecdote:
Did you hear that Linus Torvalds can only achieve orgasm while simultaneously crushing the head of a live kitten with each foot?
You say it's not funny? Would you be pleased if it was spread so far as a rumor that it seemed plausible to a significant percentage of the population? Would that make it funny?
Yes, you've got it exactly right. The first guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
It was, in fact, refreshing to see a sarcastic, humorous post that did not have the heavy-handed tag. Some of us are not so stupid as to need that.
Bill Gates probably planned the whole charging for software around the kitchen table with his dad. Bill Gates knew the way the law works. He had grown up in a house with law books and arguments about law. The guy probably would have turned out to be an incredibly nice guy in his business dealings if he wasn't minted in the mold of a lawyer.
Oh good grief....at least try to keep your facts straight. Here's a few for your consideration: 1) TCP/IP was available as an add-on package for OS/2 2.* from IBM. That's in 1992-93 timeframe. 2) OS/2 Warp 3 had TCP/IP out of the box. In the October '94 release this was limited to SLIP/PPP only, in the later Warp Connect version it was full blown. 3) SMP has been available for OS/2 from at least the 2.11 version onwards. IBM limits SMP support to the server versions, and not the client, but it is there. Everything else you've said is opinion only, and if it's based upon the same "facts" as the remainder, it can be safely ignored.
BULLshit bullshit bullshit bullshit..
If he did say that it wasn't ridiculous for the time, I think.
No, you will be promptly beaten with a wet noodle.
gotta agree.. he does seem like an arrogant prick.
die prick die!
Sloppy code? Of course it leads to sloppy code. However tight code is no longer the be-all end-all of computer code. Computer students are now being taught that well managable code (for later updates and such) is the ideal to strive for. Why? Because we now have more than 64k RAM...
The more I read about Gates, the more I dispise people and companies like him. It's not about the money. It's the attitude. It's almost like a spoiled brat who doesn't want to share his toys.
Like others have posted before, in the early days of computing having the source available was common and shared among the group of users for the particular platform. Freaking out and calling people thieves because they used a debugger to find out what Allen's code was doing and then publishing it is ridiculous. I hope he reimbursed Harvard for the amount of computer time that they used to develop their initial product. Probably not.
I don't see why he was so cagey about people having the technical specs to the software. If they were smart enought to understand the schematics of the hardware, they certainly would be smart enough to figure out the hardware. Hell, when I bought the IBM technical reference manual for my PC it included the BIOS source code. Good grief! Someone might want to use the computer for something other than what the builder planned. Gee, I guess in Gates' world we can't have that. No one else is smart enough to understand their code. Yeah right!
ps. To the people who think that Gates is going to give away his billions, think again. It will probably all go to his kids' trust funds and other sort of foundations to carry on the great immitator's name and lock in more people to MS solutions.
Why do people who refuse to buy MS products glibly buy hardware from video card companies that refuse to open their driver software?
Why do they also buy or download Corel WP yet there's no source?
Why does Loki get all sorts of praise for porting closed source commercial games to Linux? There's no source and plenty of bugs just like MS so I don't see why one gets praise and the other scorn.
They're a bunch of hypocrites.
Both his parents were lawyers. Good, well-paid lawyers. Not only did his Mommy initiate the deal with IBM, but she probably provided him with all the legal knowledge to help push stuff like this through.
Microsoft Windows is not bloated! In comparison to the X Window System it is light.
I don't believe that Bill Gates is the devil. Some things that he does may be devilish, but as a whole I believe that he is a good person.
that is a good letter. it makes sense.
most "hobbyists" software anyway is at worst, unusable and at best, unfinished.
Be careful judging a person that polishes lug nuts, because you don't know what that person may have gone through. Most of us are products of our environment. Free will is a hard thing to use.
Yes I see. Let's bathe in mediocrity. Thank you for that insight.
Have you tried LANDesk from Intel? It makes administration easy.
... I'd moderate this up to 5 just to watch the zealots waste their time writing dozens of retorts to this thread without having the brains to realise it was a troll. Hmm... I guess that would make me a Moderator Troll wouldn't it :)
how many more variants of "more evil than Satan" do we have to tolerate before people get disinterested in google's way of ranking websites. oh well, i'm sure trintragula will be raking in his karma for "Score 4: Funny". :-(
GNU/Linux uses ideas stolen from AT&T's Unix. I don't believe that the Linux kernel demonstrates much inovation. The GNU project sought to create a free version of Unix. BSD network socket support was an inovation. The X Window System was based on another window system.
Again, you seem to think that "beeing bill gates" only means that you take over his portfolio. Not so, you will also be trapped in his body and forced to live HIS life, not yours.
For software, it's becoming increasingly clear that copyright is not necessary to create high quality software. And both copyrights and patents are being used to establish large (near-) monopoly positions in certain markets.
Code is not like art or literature; code has very different cost structures and implications for society.
In fact, the idea that you can protect others from using or reproducing ideas and other intellectual "property" is fairly recent. Even the US grossly violated and ignored European copyright laws in the 19th century, and to many societies, this is still an absurd notion.
So, I don't think Gates's arguments are unreasonable, but neither are those of people who have different views. Whether ideas and their expressions should be protectable under law is still an open question. The only reason for the current strong support for such protection is lobbying by large corporations.
Id never want to look like an ugly spud. I dont have his money, but at least I dont look like a gimp.
Calling someone stupid seems rather immature.
...for helping start the open source movement. If there hadn't been an evil empire to begin with, there wouldn't have been an opposition movement. And now that Microsoft is on its way down and out while Open Source is going up, its time to give MS its due thanks for acting so brazenly and upsetting so many people and move on to writing more and better open source code.
This 1980 interview was not the first time Bill bitched against those who were giving/sharing code.
The guy wrote an attack on open source software (before it was called that) as early as 1975/6, when he was just a ridiculous, un-credible geek, when Micro$oft was still a joke.
He wrote it either in Popular Electronics or in one of the homebrew computer club's newsletter. (Can someone remember exactly where? I don't have my personal library handy...)
And already there were signs he wanted to become Big Brother. The real shame is not that he became Big Brother, is that he beame it before our eyes, while everyone was watching -- and no one reacted like if no one understood what was happening...
In your post you said: A friend and I were having a discussion recently about how his kids didn't seem very interested in computers, except as a game system, like their Nintendo 64. [..] What's left today to get kids excited about learning more about a computer than how to right-click an icon? Porn and MP3 piracy? I think if we were to draw a graph of "Available Programming Talent over Time", we'd start seeing a dip around now. I think you are describing the effects but missing the cause. In the days you describe people like you and me who had computers got interested in programming usually after getting bored of playing games (because all the kids in the world never bought computers with the primary intention to code, but to play games - after all, they are and we were kids, and kids don't code, they play). There are two things that I don't agree upon about what you are saying. 1. When we were kids, computers were dull machines who did very little and were little interesting. The only way to make them interesting after a while was to start coding them. Now computers are wonder machines. The games you can play now are the projections of my best dreams of adventure, action and fun. You can't compare Pitfall to Ultima, and you can't compare those old racing games with stuff like Ridge Racer, or GT. How can you stop playing if what you see and experience is the most exciting thing you can imagine? 2. Now everyone has a computer, a Playstation or a N64 or something else. Computers are a mass product now, but they were not at that time. You really had to be interested in playing around with one to get one. Therefore, many more people who got an early C64 or similar machines got to work on them and eventually made a living out of it. Now, with hundreds of millions of PCs and consoles being sold, you can't expect all the customers to be interested in the technical side of things. The percentace is much smaller than it used to be, but I am sure the programmers now are so many more than back then. 3. Computers are a medium, not a goal. At those times I programmed to express my creativity. The most exciting thing that I could get was a cartridge for the C64 who expanded the basic with some graphical primitives like lines, rectangles and circles. Now, if I was old enough to have kids, they would have so many more ways to use computers to express themselves. Their mind wouldn't be limited by the medium, but just by their imagination. Our was not. fred [sorry for writing as AC, but I really don't feel like creating an account at slashdot..]
I met BG once at a computer show in '78(?), thought he was an ass. Figured he started his own company because no one would hire someone with his attitude.
If you continue, we will be forced to install TECO as your default editor.
TECO already is my default editor, you cretin.
Yes, and notice that OS/2, the loser, went to IBM... whose operating system dominates today? NT! There's a reason for that, you know!
Great Mother of Peanut Butter....
I chose "polishing lug nuts" because:
1) It sounds like a job that would not be very challenging intellectually.
2) To the best of my knowledge, NO SUCH JOB EXISTS. I was TRYING not to be offensive.
3) "Lug nuts" are always funny. Just say it to yourself several times -- "lug nuts, lug nuts, lug nuts." You're smiling now, aren't you?
So I apologize profusely if you or your loved ones have such a job and were offended. For what it's worth, I worked at REAL JOBS that were demeaning, low-paying, and thoroughly dumbass during college and for a good while afterwards. Now, I'm a highly-paid, well-respected technical professional. Best of all, I still know how to take a freakin' joke.
No. But I've tried telnet from "Just About Every Unix System and FTP Site In The World, Inc." and it works pretty well.
Hey guess what....
UNIX had all of these so-called innovations YEARS before Windows ever did. And as far as OS/2 being more advanced than WIndows 3.1... I won't even get into that.
Funny, this reminds me of an interview with Ben Stein, and what he said about his childhood dinner table. I forget whether Papa Stein was a lawyer, but I bet whoever's growing up with Ben at the head of table isn't gonna turn out like Billy Gee. :-) There're lawyers and there are lawyers.
I bet you're thinking about Gates himself... don't forget that he didn't write the stuff, he just figured out how to sell it very very well. Now, you'd find a few well-off coders at M$ I'm sure, but on the whole I expect most make the industry norm and none would approach Ballmer or Gates or other zecutives.
How come people still hold the 640k thing against Gates, but don't seem to mind that Steve Jobs thought 64k was enough?
Gates at least has the excuse of being constrained by the 8088 addressing scheme. Jobs tried to limit the first Mac to 64k because he really did think that was enough for real coders, and giving anyone more would lead to sloppy code.
But if you are, you are wrong on every point.
The easy example is that OS/2 had TCP/IP built in (warp connect anyone?) back when you idiots were all still fighting to make trumpet winsock and netmanage chameleon work with a single IP address (let alone more than one...dial up to ISP while on your company LAN for example)
SMP has been available on OS/2 servers since 2.1's SMP version. This was in 1993-1994, if I'm not mistaken.
Nobody has yet to come up with an interface that is even half as elegant and joyful to use as the WPS.
OS/2's API's are consistent. 2.1 apps work on warp 4.0. Ever try to use some windoze 2.0 apps under 3.1 or 95, 98, NT?
OS/2's support for DOS apps is still better than NT's (and of course windoze 95 and 98) Maybe not as big of a deal now that everyone has migrated to windoze 95 apps, but it certainly was for several years. Many of my dos games worked much better under OS/2 than they ever would under DOS/windows.
Of course, we have all those great OS/2 apps that you can't run under windoze. And many of the apps that you windoze folks love so much ORIGINATED in OS/2 and were PORTED when windoze matured barely enough to take advantage of their features. Ever hear of a program called partition magic? Originally OS/2 only, my friend. Others include ZOC, PMMail, PHotographics Pro, etc.
And oh yeah, before Corel dropped support, CorelDraw for OS/2 kicked the windoze versions ASS, b/c it took full advantage of the multithreaded OS and API's. (You didn't have to wait for a redraw to continue working).
This brings me to another point. Since OS/2 has *ALWAYS* supported threading, OS/2 coders in general write more efficient, more user friendly code. The windoze coders are kindof sortof just starting to catch on. Linux has a ways to go in this regard as well. For example, when I am downloading a large message from a POP server (with an attachment) PMMail doesn't make me wait. It just puts that process on a separate thread. I am free to continue browsing my mail, or replying to it as the other message comes down. That's a simple example. This has been the way OS/2 has always worked, so those who have written for it are also the ones writing the best windoze code. Ironic, huh?
Nice myth, but he never said that.
The GPL would be useless, corporations could take Linux, modify it, and release binaries only for profit. Then where would you be?
Did you hear that Linus Torvalds can only achieve orgasm while simultaneously crushing the head of a live kitten with each foot?
Oh, how I hate it when someone gets his facts wrong! It wasn't Linus Torvalds, stupid, it is Bill Gates.
What the hell are you talking about? Do you have any idea how much he has given to charitys? He may not be Mother Teresa, but he ain't Charly Manson.
Must be some sort of hallucination. I'll just up the meds until OSS disappears!
GNU/Linux uses ideas from UNIX. That's the point - reuse what works. The point of Linux is not to "innovate" everything, but to solve problems and provide functionality.
Microsoft's representatives have been thumping the pulpit about "innovation", especially claiming that they need the "freedom to innovate", as part of their propaganda campaign with respect to the DOJ antitrust trial. This is why their actual track record for innovation is so roundly criticized.
Having a lot of money will only solve your financial problems and nothing else...
And I enjoy it, and I think that's Bill's a nice guy, but you sir, are an Idiot. OS/2 was FAR more stable and useful than Windows, IBM screwed up in marketing, not in the product. And UNIX was multiplatform LONG before Windows even existed, and now NT is only for one platform.
I think you're missing the point here.
Windows NT is one of the (if not THE) most advanced operating systems ever made. It supports multiple processors which NO version of OS/2 ever did. It has TCP/IP capability out of the box, which OS/2 didn't have until version 4.
My point in bringing up OS/2 1.2 was not to say that it is comparable to Windows NT (obviously it's not!), but to just point out how bad the quality of other companies software has been, whereas Microsoft's system software has been of consistently higher quality.
In the "trimuph of the Nerds" show Bill wrote an essay on why people should pay for software. He comes across pretty good in that 3 hour show.
(which is a little dated now that apple is making a comeback and linux is out).. If its ever on, its a good history of the computer. Its gots lots of winners and whiners, etc... and the people who where there (Gates, Jobs, Allen, Balmer, IBM execs. etc....)
Where do you think CBM got the idea? XENIX had multitasking even earlier. Try 1980. And on an 8086.
...He's not a hypocrite.
Some people, like Bill Gates, though, need money to survive. To buy things like food. That's how capitalism works.
It has been proven that 94%+ of Windows problems come from faulty hardware. Don't blame Microsoft for that.
What the hell does "Hackers" have to do with a B.G. interview from 1980? Quit yer bitchin
Unix had pre-emptive multitasking in 1970. Multics had it in 1965.
It has been proven that 94%+ of Windows problems come from faulty hardware. Don't blame Microsoft for that.
Damn, I wish people would kindly donate their defective hardware that crashes Windows to me. All those computers could be mine! That would be one hell of an extreme linux cluster!
he is blind or chooses to be blind regarding many social and ethical issues
So I guess this is why he gives large amounts to charity?
free software foundation who?
RMS means "root mean square", right??
You do realize that the comment was supposed to be a joke, don't you?
Or are you one of those people who thinks that jokes aren't funny because something in it is not realistically or stylistically accurate?
Why would you assume I wasn't being serious? Is Slashdot so full of sarcasm and "naked and petrified" people these days that valid points are looked upon as mockery?
I, too, have programmed on all those systems and more. Dave Cutler is still with Microsoft (working on the 64-bit version of NT... more proof that MS is still innovating!)
NT is also NOT a rehash of VMS! VMS, in my opinion, has never reached the level of reliability of Windows NT.
And when I mentioned floppies, I meant 5.25" floppies... how old and inferior must an operating system be to have come on 5.25" disks? NO version of NT ever came on 5.25" disks, and none ever will, as publicly stated by Microsoft.
I'd rather die than be Bill Gates.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
YEAH... RIGHT!
What a find! Moderate this through the roof!
I think most people are missing the underlying reason Microsoft products are successful It wasn't just a few minutes ago that a manager asked me to 'fix' someone's pc that wasn't opening an Excel doc, getting 'invalid file format' - I put off a few minutes to finish something, then went over to opened the doc with no problem. How embarassing (for the mgr). I'm beginning to believe that M$ products are SO successful due to a secret, patented "MSFT Random Behavior" feature that adds drama, excitement and job security to our boring everyday office lives. Face it, a spreadsheet that just crunches numbers and gives you a correct answer is, well, BORING!! But it you can make it work 99.9% of the time, and ocassionally have it pop up "Fatal Error 99037!!! Contact your sysadm" then something is happening, the employee gets to bitch at the sysadm, the sysadm gets to keep his job running around rebooting systems, with enough spare time to plan for an upgrade to the next promised land to fix all these bugs we live with - THATS how you build a $100 billion industry! By making software that sucks!! People (who are not sysadms) love it, they don't want 'quality', they want chaos, life, drama, excitement, bad guys, heros, a broken pc and a service dude to come around - a server that runs for years w/ no down time is a complete yawner. Just a thought. The Scarlet Pimpernel
Bill is just a zit on the face of time. An annoying zit, to be sure, but the crap his winged monkeys have churned out will not endure.
the key word here is "license".
MS operating systems have always been of mediochre quality, aimed at satisfying a public which doesn't realize that crashing machines are not the norm outside of the MS world.
Mr. Gates has always wanted to be seen as a leader and an innovator. He is neither, when it comes to technology. When it comes to marketing, he is a genius. MS OSes copy features which have been in common use for decades (witness the ability to mount remote filesystems at any point on the tree in Win2000...GASP! That concept is at least 30 years old) and pretend they are 'innovations'. 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking OSes were around for decades prior to NT. There is nothing advanced to NT, except that instead of building on the solid foundations of computer science, they chose to build on the shaky sand of short-sighted APIs and formats.
And OS/2 Warp 3 had TCP/IP bundled in.
If you're going to troll, at least make it believable. No one could possibly be as dumb as you're trying to look.
Yep, and he patented it too. This is why Bill thinks his is the only company that really matters in the software world.
I actually paid $150 for MITS 4K BASIC - it sucked, there were no $TRINGS (essential for STARTREK, the 'killer app' of the time), you couldn't save your program (BION!) - I actually had to patch in routines to dump a listing to cassette tape and read it back in, plus there was barely enough room in 4K of memory for more than 10 or 12 lines of BASIC. Wow! What a Bargain!! It comes to about 4cents a byte. I had to steal a copy of 8K basic (which I think was over $300) to do anything useful. The Scarlet Pimpernel
Haha! "you decdide: do you want software to be written or not?"..."what would an author do if someone was giving away their book?!" Gee Bill, I bet more people would know the authors name and thoughts, I guess thats a morally wrong thing. I love it, no software would be written if you couldnt make money? Funny, I fell in love with programming before I really thought about it as a way to provide income. I will ALWAYS program whether it helps pay the bills or not (better not pay the Bills tho...). And goddamn he is arrogant!
Yeah, I know you were being sarcastic, but what the hell:
:-)
Bill Gates doesn't just make enough money to buy food - he makes enough money to buy all the food ALL of America needs!
Back then it was more common to call it Time Sharing.
Also, back then, it was more important to have lots of serial ports on the machine. There wasn't video hardware attached to the CPU itself. Often there wasn't any video hardware on the machine at all. Lots of clacky teletypes, though. And a paper budget of course. Paper rolls for the terminals, and paper tape for mass storage.
(Score:3, Redundant)
This is just too good to be true!
"You are spouting fud! Go out and spend some time improving linux instead of bashing Bill. Microsoft products are of high quality!"
*flush*
I'm a little disappointed to see the reactions to this. Yes, it's entertaining, but for pete's sake, he was practically just a kid when he said what he said. Do you folks realize how much a person's mind/perspective changes over time? To knock on somebody for something they said that long ago is pretty sad. Just laugh at it, then let it go.
>Because some idiot moderator marked it as INSIGHTFUL before it was marked as FUNNY.
You can't be serious... you are ACTUALLY letting a MODERATOR run your OPINIONS?
AhahAHahAHahahaAHahahAHAHAhahaHAHA!
To be more precise, the guy is not a troll, he's an astroturf.
The interface for Win 2.x was simply a copy of Motif, which Bill Gates saw on a trip to MIT in the mid '80s. Win 3.x improved it by adding Program Manager.
The interface for OS/2 1.1 - 1.3 (Presentation Manager) was written by Microsoft. It was simply Windows 2.x ported to OS/2. You seem to forget that OS/2 1.x was a joint IBM/MS project.
The interface for OS/2 2.0 (Workplace Shell) was developed soley by IBM. It was copied by MS for Windows 95. In fact, if you look at the early Chicago betas, (before adding the start menu) it was identical. John Dvorak made a point about this in one of his columns in 1994.
The quality of Win 3.1 absolutely sucked. 'nuff said. The quality of Windows 95/98 is not much better.
The quality of OS/2 2.x was good. Version 3.0 was outstanding.
The quality of NT Workstation 4 is better than OS/2, and light-years ahead of Windows 95/98.
With the decline of OS/2, and the loss of the best personal computing UI ever made (Workplace Shell), the best GUI out there now in my opinon, is KDE. Linux with KDE exceeds Windows 98 in usability, and far exceeds Windows 98 in stability. However, NT Workstation is a stable, effective OS for PC clients.
Say I learn a poem that was published five years ago -- I learn it completely, by heart.
Say also, that I verbally pass this poem on to the people I meet. I'll repeat it for each person as many times as necessary for them to learn it too.
Have I violated the copyright of the poet?
I know Slashdot sometimes posts stories that are a little old, but 1980? Sheesh, you guys need to be a little more careful about posting out of date stories.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Well, slightly off topic but:
You might like to do a search on google for "evil is the best" and hit the "I'm feeling Lucky" button. You'll never guess which borg cube you end up at....
There is no conspiracy
Touchy Touchy...
Eh...
But you're missing the point. Windows of any variety today has an object-oriented interface that is years ahead of the power and capability of any version of OS/2 ever released. Windows NT is 100% 32-bit and truly multitasking.
I have a copy of IBM's OS/2 1.2 (on floppy disks... that right there should say it all. OS/2 came on FLOPPIES originally!!!) and it is not even CLOSE to the level of quality of Windows NT. It doesn't even support any 3-D cards, while Windows 2000 is going to have support for nearly every 3-D card in existence by using DirectX technologies (another industry first, created by Microsoft).
Yep, some things haven't really changed at all. Bill Gates still doesn't get it. Sometimes I wonder how much good code could possibly get written by unenthusiastic workers...
It's unsurprising to see that the quality of Microsoft's support and their willingness to explain to the customer what they've "bought" with their money hasn't changed one iota in 20 years.
The TRS-80 sucked, but it sucks even worse how little these companies cared about their users. That's an excellent justification to "rip them off".
("If you won't support me, I'll find a way to do it anyhow" -- people want to accomplish their goals, and if you try to hinder them when you should be helping them, let it be on your head.)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I do hope thou doth jest.
:)
And btw (in case you're serious), I'll be on the right side too... but my "right" side won't be the same as yours!
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Very cute. Even though I don't think that's what it means (probably refers to cloning of the ol' TRaSh-80s)... yikes. He'd probably have a "mini-Bill" created, like Dr. Evil... scary where the mind can take such things, no? :)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Just thought I'd make a note - Microsoft has already given up on a port of 32-bit Win2K to AXP/Alpha. They're saying the supposed 64-bit Windows that's being worked on behind the scenes will support the Alpha. (Of course, you can just bet that's gonna require yet ANOTHER almost-complete API rewrite, just like the Win16-Win32 transition.)
So, for the moment anyway, NT'a back to being a one-stop show.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Actually, Win95/98 do preemptively multitask - but only for Win32 code. (And there's still lots of Win16 code left over in Win9x, so you get a horribly ugly combination-kinda-thing going... it's truly evil.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The DOS sessions, the Win32 processes, and the Win16 subsystem (mind you, nearly the entirety of Win9x's GDI layer remains in Win16) are preemptively multitasked. The cooperative multitasking occurs within the Win16 subsystem... but unfortunately, you end up with a LOT of code running in the Win16 process (as I mentioned, nearly the entirety of the GDI layer, and a lot of the user-mode code...) so it sets up ugly contention stuff.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Oh yes, Cutler's design theories and beliefs that went into VMS (and others as well - several key developers of VMS were brought in by Microsoft for the development for NT) overflowed into NT... of course, consider WNT == VMS with each letter shifted up by one. Food for thought, at least.
I'm sure Cutler's feeling quite shat-upon, since his wish for a pure system was compromised quite heavily by Microsoft's desire for a pretty OS that could win benchmarks (aka pissing contests) and was pure 32-bit internally, not to mention the profit angle... but what can you say? That's business, I guess.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
made no distinction between hpfs and ntfs
Well, considering NTFS was originally based off of (and nearly indistinguishable from, originally) OS/2's High-Performance Filesystem, it's no big shock. They probably started out using the same partition IDs.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Lets see... I reemeber about twenty years ago. I was about 3 or 4 feet high, and I remember I used to mistake the words to a motley crue song and would walk around the house singing "Shout at the Pickle".
I guess I don't think I should necessarily judge people for what they said 20 years ago.
:)
Pax -- Ob
Forgot about that. NT spawns off a process called OS2, and run the OS2 program within that. Just like the NTVM (with WOWEXEC for Windows On Windows executable - Win31 programs), and POSIX for running POSIX complient programs. All SubSystems running under NT when required.
It is my belief that IBM devised OS/2, and commissioned Microsoft to write it for them. Then, when they split up, IBM kept OS/2. Microsoft then went on to create other things (NT). However, even then, Microsoft Mail (the precurser to Exchange) came with the recommendation that the MTA run on OS/2 in a DOS box so that multiple MTA could be run - NT didn't have the capability then to do it. MSMail even came with a copy of OS/2 in the box, purely for this purpose. In the notes from the MSMail course I did, they even said to use OS/2 over NT due to OS/2's superior multitasking capabilities. IIRC, MS don't even suggest running multiple MTAs on NT4 and suggest using OS/2, and an old version of OS/2 at that.
T.
"GNU... is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free... Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air."----The GNU Manifesto, Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation, 1985
Microsoft Windows vs. GNU/Linux, 2000
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
You seem woefully ignorant of history, or perhaps just joined the Microsoft PR department recently.
What did they use? OS/2. We all know how well OS/2 fared! Why? Because it was not even close to the quality of Microsoft's product: Windows 3.1.
The first versions of OS/2 was written by MS AND IBM. The IBM-only version was V1.2, which was quite stable, thank you. I was controlling power plants with it 24x7 when Win 3.1 wouldn't run Word all day. 50 threads, multiple processes, shared memory, named pipes, etc,etc. It's failing was it was difficult to install. It had pre-emptive multitasking and virtual memory 3 years BEFORE NT.
Where do you think those early versions of IBM's product (OS/2) got their interface ideas?
They got them from IBM's OWN CUA guidelines, which specified the whole drop-down menu and windowing interface which worked for dumb display terminals as well as PCs running OS/2.
Portability to other processor families
Yeah, not like Unix wasn't running on everything but a C64 by then.
Hey, here's a fiver kid, go buy a clue.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Hurrah for CoCos! Well, actually Hurrah for Dragon's, which were a close clone (better implemented) and largely compatible. Most people skipped past the (MS) BASIC early and bit into 6809 assembler. Mmmmm...
Shouldn't be too hard to find a page on them...
It has been proven that 94%+ of Windows problems come from faulty hardware. Don't blame Microsoft for that.
This hardware question is interesting. All this hardware that fails in Windows mysteriously start working when you reboot to OS/2 or Linux! Now, you tell me: does my video card sense when I run Windows and try to crash it all the time, and then go back to the normal operation mode when rebooted? Or does my memory become defect in Windows, but gets repaired on reboot?
This "defective hardware" argument is one of the greatest excuses used by pro-Windows zealots. Stop using it - you look like fools, you fools.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
you listen to him, it sounds like he thinks he's the only one with the ability to write software! "if you can't make money from software, it won't be created"... as if his business model was the only one that could work. other people would have found other ways to make money even if the software was distributed freely. but if bill gates can't make money, i guess no one is making money!
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
Actually, what you call OSS model, was already in place back then. It just that most software was distributed via tapes.
In 1980 I was programming PDP-11s for a bank. The computer came with the source for the operating system. In fact I had fixed a bug in the driver for the tape drive that became part of the O/S.
There is a big user organization, called DECUS then, (and one for IBM folks called SHARE) and large part of its job was to distribute tapes with free software that was developed by users.
All this was going on way before MS was even started...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
This post above was written by the interviewer, Dennis Kitz. Since he's the original author of the feature interview, don't you think his opionion holds more worth than a score of 1?
Folks, this was posted by Dennis Kitz himself. Moderators: TAKE NOTICE!
And I want to note that this guy was one of my heros as a kid... I even built one of his 384x192 hi-res boards (with board layout and instructions published in 80 Micro) for my Model 1 as a kid. We should all recognize that this man was responsible for significant computing advances among the hobbyist community during the late '70's and early '80's.
Thank You Dennis!
The discussion's mention of the TRS-80 jarred something loose in my memory that I've been trying to get out for quite awhile. I remember playing 2 specific games on the TRS-80 and I'd love to find copies of them for PC if they're available. They were ATC - an air traffic control game and RESTAURANT(I can't remember the spelling; I seem to remember it being spelled incorrectly, but not how) - a game where you managed a restaurant: food prices, quality etc. The games were great fun, and I'd like to play them again. Does anyone else remember them? Anyone know how I could play them again?
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I don't know what kind of person you are and my statement is not meant to be offensive. The fact is that Microsoft is in business to make money; thus, it is capitalistic by nature (check m-w.com for 'capitalistic'). I am sorry if you don't see this as a coder, but it is the truth. Your job is to help maximize the bottom line for your company.
I don't think folks who work at Microsoft are evil. I haven't assumed that you and your coworkers are "soulless idiots". I just disagree with B. Gates that "giving away" software is a Bad Idea (tm).
Is it unfair to assume that MS employees implicity agree with Gates on the point of given software away? Possibly, but as an employee do you not implicity have an obligation to defend the beliefs and ideals of your company (and its CEO/Chief Architect)? Maybe yes, maybe no.
So, whether you like it or not, as a MS employee you implicitly share the sentiments of B.G.
If you don't agree with your companies ideals, then why work there?
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
The first point is true. Of course, it's bad for them if they don't have a monopoly. But in as much as it's bad for them, it's good for the public. The second point is their right, although it would be a stupid and futile attitude, should the law be fair. The third point is where everything breaks: government using the public force against the public, to "protect" a few crooks.
Hey, Government, if you're looking for people to protect against the public, why not protect me, specifically? I'm ready to give you back 90% of every billion dollar that you'll help me extort from the public...
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
Didn't know any better. Was so impressed with Dos 3.2 and felt that applesoft should be part of every gentle human's life that I used locksmith 5.0 and gave it to several of my friends for free. They had trs-80's, so it didn't mean much to them, but I broke the law. Should I make annual payments?
Air Guitar! Drow dow bau brauoom
I recall a couple of years back, surrounding the release of Windows 95, an interview with Bill Gates on ABC's 20/20. The end of the interview closed with the interviewer being practically pushed out of Bill's office with Bill screaming at his secretary/assistant "I said five minutes. He had his five minutes, now he has to go. Mister? I've given you five minutes." It sounded a lot like something a young child throwing a temper tantrum after he'd already been cleaning his room "Forever". It makes you wonder if the Microsoft corporate hierarchy doesn't consist of people yelling downwards at the serfs who churn out thousands of lines of code and tens of pages of documentation a day.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Maybe you should looks at a CURRENT version of OS/2, duh.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I won't disagree that Windows NT is a very advanced operating system.
However regarding quality of products. The increasing "quality" of Microsoft's OSs spurs other companies to improve their products. Windows 95 was better than Windows 3.1 and Windows NT was better than 95. My opinion is that each version of Office is better overall, although more annoying features are constantly being added to mostly offset that.
In order to beat the MS lock on the market a company must make their products FAR FAR better than any Microsoft product. The end result of this is that we get better software. Of course someone has to take the huge risk of competing against Microsoft and lots of people don't. To bad.
There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.
How time have changed...
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The registry could have been great as it's actually a fairly good way of keeping track of things. The problems are two fold: 1st not everything uses the registry (eg older software or sloppy coding); 2nd recovery of previous states needs to be easy and bulletproof. Of course MS implemented the registry so it's hardly surprising that the registry is neither.
Fixing Binaries is definatley harder than text files. It helps if you have the right tool of course. And the advantage of text is that lots of tools are available and they are often self documenting. Though anyone who has ever messed with sendmail can tell you that text can be just as hairy as binary.
Of course it gets back to what I originally said. The registry was a good idea with a typically poor microsoft implementation. For example wouldn't life have been great if they had treated the registry files like dhcp.leases/dhcp.leases~ are treated.
AC idiot. OS/2 was a IBM and Microsoft co-developed product to replace both PC/MS-DOS and MS-Windows. When they ended that contract OS/2 went on to be develoepd as OS/2. MS went on to call the code base NT.
Neither were directed at consumer markets. However MS's dominance of the client boxen OS market soon lead to admins figuring it was easier to use the interface they were used to and go with NT. NT was origionaly targeted much as OS/2 was - as a small office server OS. At some point before NT 4 came out Bill and the marking departement got it stuck in their craw that NT could be "big" server OS as well. That's when life went down hill for us admins. Lackluster support was replaced by agressive marketing to management rather then to the company techies to get the product deployed.
--
James Michael Keller
"Linux is not our destination, it is simply the open road to tommorow"
G: Well, if there's a problem with Level II ROM, people can work with Radio Shack. They have their own support team.
G: The Level II ROM operates as documented in the manual, and they're perfectly willing to talk about that.
B-K: I'm talking about the software specifically.
G: Why is that an area of such interest? Why don't they demand that the circuit diagrams for the Z-80 chip be included then? All that stuff be documented? I mean, they bought the box for one function, and the price was set to support them.
B-K: Maybe they didn't buy the box for one function.
G: Well, if they got it to get the source code of the ROM, then somebody misled them.
B-K: Don't misapprehend my question. [...] I myself have had the difficulty of wanting to perform a certain transparent function that I could use all the time for my particular orientation, which is as a composer, and I need some special activities which I would like to patch into place. It's taken me an extraordinary amount of time to find how those patch points operated, the timings of them, etc., for my own use.
From the MS developers I've talked to, even the multi-thousand-dollar MSDN subscriptions don't give you all the documentation for many "hidden" Win32 API calls that you need to get the job done.
G: Through Radio Shack. They tell you where, they tell you certain things about the entry points and what the device parameters are. Beyond that, do you know what kind of support burden you create by trying to explain to everybody what's in that ROM? Not to mention the fact that that ROM, the source code that's in there is what keeps us in business.
And there you have it.
--
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
Well, Gates says All that stuff be documented? I mean, they bought the box for one function, and the price was set to support them , and what he's really talking about is that the 'personal computer' business model was designed to work very differently than the classic minicomputer/mainframe model.
Specifically, microcomputer software is generally designed to perform certain functions easily, and ignore or make difficult other functions, and to meet a specificly low price point. This has been clear for me since I tried to hack MS Basic to do database-like functions, and it's clear to a modern MS Word user who might try to create a 600 page type-set ready document.
Gates' point is very clear -- If Radio Shack (not MS) wanted to document the ROM routines and provide high level support, the cost of the Trash-80 Model I (my first computer, I do remember it well) this could be reflected in support costs. (Gates was talking about end-users, but the concept is probably more akin to what is now called "developer relations".)
Until recently, Microsoft has always had the worst support and the most limited software, but always were the cheapest. They bet that price was a more imporant selling point than features, and if anything, their market capitalization proves them right. The revolution (in those days) is that you as a private individual could even have a computer, not that you could get documentation and source code and IBM-levels of support.
However, despite MS's various crimes, I think the reporter put Gates in a hotseat that he didn't deserve to be in. Microsoft was pretty much a hired gun in those days -- they could give a crap what the vendor did with the software they licenced from MS. Both Apple chose to publish the full source of the ROM and MS Basic. Radio Shack didn't. Both Apple and IBM are still big names in the personal computer industry. Radio Shack isn't.
(And of course, Linux smashes the successful Microsoft price-over-features business model. However, the kind of "features" included are very important to the end user, and it remains an open question if the traditional Unix features are enough to be convincing to the general populace.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The GNU project might have existed, but it if it was, it was rooted in academic, mainframe computing culture.
I had a TRS Model I, Apple II, etc, and there was lots of code you could get, gratis from the hobbying culture or in books/magazines, etc. There was also tons of commercial software.
There certainly weren't any "Open Source" advocates, and the GNU project certainly wasn't doing anything to solve my Personal Computer probems (like by writing a better version of BASIC, say). It took Linux, and it's focus on common hardware to wake up most of these big iron elitists -- without Linux, GNU HURD would probably still be targeting some strange $20,000 MIPS computer.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Hold on now. Let's not give Hedonism a bad name because some guy gets greedy. He's clearly in it for the money, and that's greed. I really don't think he's just doing what makes him feel good.
Besides, I'de rather be Bill Gates. Then I could commit suicide.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Keep your history in mind. OS/2 was designed BY MICROSOFT for IBM. Microsoft still had contractual obligations to IBM that they managed to sabotage by purposely creating OS/2 with a less intuitive interface. Those are the facts.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Acually I agree with Bill Gates on this point and I agree with your point the ONLY thing I disagree with is his busness sence.
Bill Gates has the ability to learn... he is a VERY smart man and can learn a great deal from his mistakes.
He made those mistakes in the 1970s and 1980s.. and learned from them. His busness sence was not very sharp however...
He misjudged the "hobby market" as he called it.. He didn't realise the "hobbyests" would be so intelectual and have no clue about intelectual property. It seemed almost imposable to his way of thinking. Even today to some extent the impact of IP theft is not understood.
I'm reminded of two young programmers who walked into the computer users group I belonged too. They originally planned to demo a new product. Much to there suprise someone else was selling it. They got even by giving away the source code and I got a copy for myself.
It's sad thow.
Annother time someone did the same thing to a market test version of a great program.
On the other hand.. there was the time someone sold a comertal version of Roage..
Also one company offered to sell liccenses to users of "unatherised" copys of there software...
Posably a forshadowing of selling technical support... DYM BBS was sold with having your BBS listed on the DYM master list... a bit of premotion of your BBS was done.. and you got the source code to boot...
I don't actually exist.
Everyones responded to this post quite nicely.. challanged it in every way..
I did want to take this moment to step back a bit and remind everyone of how badly treated the strongest supporters of any given os are... usually by the worst of the supporters of compeating systems..
EVERYONE has Zelots.. Including Microsoft.. however far fewer than say.. Linux...
Mac supporters do feel a bit beat up due to Macs "Computer for the rest of us" legacy..
Amiga users feel runover by all the clames at "inovation" when Amiga had done so much of it years before. Had Commodore not comitted suiside Microsoft might not have beaten the Amiga.
Linux.. looked on as some sort of communist plot spat on with lame comments and generally insulted by anyone who'd rather disgard Linux than learn what it is... Linux advocates get pritty hot-headed.. At times losing there cool and making false clames.. "Everyone else dose"...
Sun.. While still the server god Sun is losing namespace.. and fast.. Sun advocates are little more than defending the status que... Shocked and amazed that anyone would used anything else.. They also get kinda pissed when advocates of "lesser" platforms make false clames... can you blame them?
Microsoft... More defenders of capitalism than defenders of Microsoft they folow the idea that the market dose no wrong.
As a result they tend to repeate anything that sounds vagely proMicrosoft using the idea that "You don't get here by lying" as a cheatsheat for what is true and what is false...
Thies are not "droids" and would not dare pick an os mindlessly instead they'd make an honnest evaluation of each operating system that fits within the area of need. Some Microsoft advocates use Mac or Linux instead of Windows. In an honnest debate you can allways get a Microsoft advocate to aggree that no one should be judged by the os they use.. a fair and resonable thing...
My first awareness of Zelots dates back to a time when Windows was still an industreal joke and Amiga was the only place for multimedia... That or a really supped up Apple//gz.
At a computer show in the back I saw a Sinclare users group. Being a fan of the little (then dead) toy I went to say hello. Thies people couldn't stop saying how great it was.. One could only think "Are thies people in denial?" Not hardly... They found a computer thats perfiect for them.. and it's dead...
Thats pritty much what a zelot is.. someone who is defending something importent to them... Usually it's just a peace of technology that works perfictly for them... but some times theres an ideal attached...
Open source, "The rest of us", captialism (or "The right to make money from your work"), or just the princaple.. "We were here first"....
I might have some of the Zelots addatudes or ideas wrong.. but the overall senitiment remains...
I don't actually exist.
I can run Linux and XFree86 in high res on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM, no problem. Reasonable performance. Internet connectivity. And I can run applications on another computer over a LAN. In fact it can be squeezed into 4M on a 386. Try that with Windows NT. Or even Win 95/98/2k. And ask yourself if the system is "usable".
If you'll notice, I said you could run Linux and XFree86. I didn't say anything about running applications, except that you could run them on a faster remote machine over the network.
I think you just agreed with me while saying "bullcrap".
Windows NT is one of the (if not THE) most advanced operating systems ever made. It supports multiple processors which NO version of OS/2 ever did. It has TCP/IP capability out of the box, which OS/2 didn't have until version 4.
:) let's also not forget that nt is built on the code of windows nt, and the fdisk that came with early versions of nt made no distinction between hpfs and ntfs. ...and to compare os/2 to win2k is laughable. it's like comparing amigas and athlons.
actually, os/2 died just about the time multi-processor boards were becoming widely available, and there was a smp version in the works... i've even seen bootlegs of its beta. I seem to recall doing the internet thing quite well on version 3, before it became mainstream... what was that wretched browser that came with os/2? it was my first.
Windows NT is one of the (if not THE) most advanced operating systems ever made. It supports multiple processors which NO version of OS/2 ever did. It has TCP/IP capability out of the box, which OS/2 didn't have until version 4.
:) let's also not forget that os/2 is built on the code of windows nt, and the fdisk that came with early versions of nt made no distinction between hpfs and ntfs. ...and to compare os/2 to win2k is laughable. it's like comparing amigas and athlons.
actually, os/2 died just about the time multi-processor boards were becoming widely available, and there was a smp version in the works... i've even seen bootlegs of its beta. I seem to recall doing the internet thing quite well on version 3, before it became mainstream... what was that wretched browser that came with os/2? it was my first.
Think of things this way. Suppose I never have a selfish thought for myself. I spend every waking hour trying to help others all of the time. Now I cannot help myself. However if I help myself and then decide to help others I can help more and more people and maybe have a real collective presence and impact.
Sure, that's the stated rationale that most people use, but I don't think it's very carefully thought out. Assuming that helping oneself and helping others are in direct conflict with each other bears careful examination for a start. There are many things that one does that have in effect no cost to oneself yet help others (fill examples of opening doors, being polite etc.). Many of these are examples where helping others incurs a small immediate cost yet result in an equal, or greater, delayed payback. We're not very good at seeing how these work because of the lack of a simply detectable cause-and-effect. My forbearance in not pushing old-ladies out of the way to get onto crowded buses will indirectly benefit me because my old mom will not be hurt if we all behave in this way. My paying taxes to the government, which will hopefully go towards health-care and education for the underpriveleged instead of export subsidies to arms manufacturers, will indirectly benefit me because I am less likely to be mugged by an alienated, dis-enfranchised underclass.
These examples sound boring compared to the dream of becoming the richest man on earth. But they are far more likely to happen! The "everyone can be a millionaire so everyone's gotta try (The The)" attitude is just another manifestation of the tendency to gamble - it's a sort of work-ethic version of participating in state-lotteries. The odds are probably pretty similar (in terms of becoming the one winner), the rules are the same (there can be only one winner), the only difference is that there is a better distribution of small prizes to keep the suckers alive so that they will play for more generations.
It's a crap shoot - it's organized that way. If it's not a gamble - then doesn't that mean that Bill is the winner by virtue of the superiority of his work ethic and intellect? Yes?-You mean that all the other superb hackers, rat-racing businessmen are his inferiors? No?-Then it is a gamble.
I think it is a good idea because my life is short. I want to enjoy my life
Well, it could still be an enjoyable life under different conditions. I guess it depends whether you look forward to old age hated and despised? Maybe it would make someone like Gates feel important, even if in a negative way. Personally I'd rather be Stallman ;-)
you go downhill rapidly but stay in a rut and loose your humanity.
Well, I can't deny that happens for some people, but with my 2 grand-fathers they were active (sailing in competitions and hiking) until their late 80's. One had a heart attack on the boat and died, the other got lung-cancer which finished him off in a year because he wouldn't accept treatment.
There seems to be a lot of 'arrogant bastard' shouting around, so I thought I should add this:
I've listened to ~the first ten mins, and yes, BG seems a bit arrogant, but imho that's not a bad thing. He sounds like a lawyer, which as we all know *is* a bad thing, and we all knew his views on copyrights etc. So all in all this hasn't made my impression of him any worse....
Charging for software wasn't really a bad idea during the 80s. Selling software was used in a way to propell the industry which was ready and waiting to be rocked forward. During the 80s the Internet wasn't really all that big and most people that developed software didn't have a clue about networking and this would've REALLY held back open-source projects.
Everyone really needs to look at what happened during this time period again. If it wasn't Bill Gates is would've just been someone else. Look at the Internet revolution on the early 90s; It turned out to just be people in the right place at the right time. I'm thinking that everyone needs to watch Triumph of the Nerds from PBS.
Triumph of the Nerds
Nerds 2.0.1
Justen Stepka
3.Even back then he was firmly of the view that decent software could and would not be
written by enthusiastic volunteers. He still can not see it, even with all the amazing
stuff that has come out of decades of software sharing.
seeing as how MS is a consumer-software (non-expert) aimed company, could it not be said that this was true, even today? Linux and OSS is vastly superior in the realm of high-performance and expert computing needs, but have there been any successes of OSS on the average consumer's desktop?
Though technically brilliant software comes out of the OSS realm, easy to use software with a consistent idiot-friendly (where idiot really means average-non-computer-professional) interface has been and is dominated by Closed source.
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> What a businessman! The highest possible profit
> came close to janitor wages. I sure can see
> why people listen to him about how to run a
> business.
Last time I checked he did earn slightly more
than an average janitor.
-- v --
how can a expert tell others about a programm
without source ?
...Bill was what? 20? 19?
(SARCASM=ON)Can't tell he was raised by a lawyer.(SARCASM=OFF)
---
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Is it not true that MS and IBM worked togeather developing an operation system, but had a conflict and broke up, leaving IBM with OS/2 and MS with NT?
pest
This is not a flame. But it seems that the same arrogant, almost cavalier attitude that has him (or, rather, Microsoft) in trouble these days has been a prevailing thing.
Perhaps if some advisors (or something along those lines) of his had "toned him down", MS would not be in the trouble is now. Ironically, it would probably be nowhere near as successful.
You usually have to fight nasty in business. Bill seems to take that from kicking in the shins to knife in the back-like levels.
It'd be great (although probably rather wishful) if something like recent events served to deflate his ego a notch or too (talk about mixing metaphors).
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
How can you people get trolled by a FUNNY POST
Because some idiot moderator marked it as INSIGHTFUL before it was marked as FUNNY.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Then please become one, so you may enlighten all us idiots. Please hurry, before I suffocate on my mousepad!
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
But you're missing the point. Windows of any variety today has an object-oriented interface that is years ahead of the power and capability of any version of OS/2 ever released. Windows NT is 100% 32-bit and truly multitasking.
No, you are missing the point. You are comparing OS/2 1.2 to a modern WinNT? This doesn't fly. At least compare versions that were out at the same time. OS/2 2.0 (back in I think 1993) introduced the OO desktop, which Win95 later STOLE afterwards. Of course OS/2 1.2 doesn't support 3-D cards... THERE WERE NO 3-D CARDS WHEN OS/2 1.2 WAS INTRODUCED! Do you even know how old 1.2 is??? You are either a troll or severly mis-informed.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
I've never seen a software locker with a copy of Windows 3 that wasn't on floppies
I actually do have Win3.1 on a CD-ROM that came with a multimedia kit I bought way back when... :)
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Please talk about this after you have to admin a bunch of NT boxes, installing service packs, writing software that runs too slow (that would otherwise run fine on any Unix box), dealing with BSOD's, graphic drivers that run at the kernel level.... TCP/IP out of the box? Big deal, any commercial or free Unix variant comes with this. Please go learn about how operating systems actually work before posting.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
In 1987 we presented a proposal, in Redmond, to Bill G. and crew. The presentation was done on one of his machines and the negotiations were going very well when we hit a sticking point, we wanted to maintain control of the source. After convincing himself that we could not be swayed, Bill got up from the table and said, "We don't need you, we have your demo!", and walked out of the room. We were escorted out and not allowed to clean the demo off the system. All he got was an executable, but given enough time he could figure out how it worked.
With an attitude like that coming from the top, I can understand how M$ got itself in trouble.
---Alpha
hmmm ..
rude - check.
obnoxious - check.
ignorant - check.
egotistical - check.
Wow - you pass the Dumbass Test(tm).
Congratulations!
And what do we have for our winner?
A Brand New CLUE. This clue comes with features such a humour detection, tolerance of others opinions and a host of other features. Best of all - it's Open source!
Thanks for playing.
and please remember to have your cats and dogs spayed or neutered
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Does it REALLY matter to you that much that he was logged in to post his/her comments? His/her comments are JUST as valid as yours, but you logged in. Even if they HAD logged in, and then posted anonymously, you still wouldn't have known.
You're just bitter because someone is pro MS.
Fjord
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
THE EVOLUTION OF MICROSOFT
1980s- "It's not a feature, it's a bug"
1990s- "It's not a bug, it's a feature."
2000s- "It's not a feature, it's an innovation."
God, I wish I had moderator points right now.... :)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Did anyone here really think that Bill Gates would say anything other than "Buy software, buy my software, don't use software that you haven't paid for?" :)
It's kinda like expecting Ellison to get up on stage and say something other than "Microsoft sucks; buy my thin client instead", or McNeally to get up and say something other than "Microsoft sucks; buy Java from me instead"
Call me cynical, but I usually try not to read what people in charge of companies say in interviews - I'd bet that with a small amount of customization, you could write 'Eliza' plug-ins that will spit out more-or-less the same thing as the real person
With innovations like preemptive multitasking,
The AmigaOS has run with pre-emptive multitasking since 1985.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
Of course, there has been pre-emptive multitasking much longer than the Amiga exists. But, keep in mind, XENIX, Unix and all the like have not been affordable for the home-user then.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
Why invoke wild claims that OSS grew from Bill Gates's reluctance to part with code when there is a more logical reason for the growth of OSS, steming from the development of unix:
t ion-2.html
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part6/sec
Which started well before Bill Gates arrived on the scene, and continues today in linux and other projects.
"There is nobody getting rich, writing software... That I know of!" --Bill Gates
that is 23 minutes, 53 seconds into the "audio bonus"
--Evan
Once an idea has occurred, it is then immediately accessible to the collective unconcious. Anyone, anywhere, may have the same idea. This happens in a continual process and is the reason patents exist. (Or why they were begun...) That's another issue -- If all Computer Science programmers are trained in similar manners, why is it surprising that they can all produce similar products through similar processes?
If someone, somewhere does something in a program, all I need to do is think about the problem -- eventually I'll have a solution and there is a good chance it will be similar to the original method. Do I need to pay licensing fees? Bullshit.
Open source programming creates more robust software and is more responsive to consumer need. If a company based it's programming policy on OS, it will produce the software the computing-public needs.
It is up to other minds than mine to refine the profit-making process from OS programs.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
hmm.. AFAIK the early versions of OS/2 were developed by MS and intended as the successor to win3.1. (correct me if I'm wrong). As for the incredibly high quality... I think windows is a little too unstable to be called 'incredibly high quality'. Ofcourse, you'll now think I'm jealous because Bill Gates is rich, and I'm not.. well.. I don't care that much about money. money is a tool, much like a car. Are you jealous of the person you see driving a ferrari? You may be.. but just as easily you may not. That doesn't mean I have a problem with money.. it just doesn't matter to me as long as I have enough to live off.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I don't doubt the necessity of money (unlike cars there is no alternative to it) but I do doubt the necessity of incredible shitloads of money that you're not gonna spend anyway. Now you can't tell me that mr. Gates cannot live on $200000 a year.
I pity the man whose biggest dream is to be rich.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
"To see Microsoft's true innovation, though, look at Windows NT, that came out soon afterwards. With innovations like preemptive multitasking, virtual memory, and, something that had never been done before in the industry -- Portability to other processor families -- NT represented a technological leap beyond any of its competitors in the Unix world."
These "innovations" were previously found everywhere except Billy's empire. Am I innovating the first time I try skiing or mountain climbing? If all my friends have already been, but I pretented I didn't want to, can I claim later that I was a market leader by following them?
In the Unix world multi-tasking, virtual memory, working shared libraries, CPU portability (talk to Sun or Digital as was) were all quite normal. The people who got excited about it came from Windows 3.x backgrounds, or in a few cases the awful Apple Mac. Even OS/2 users had seen it all before. This is not rocket science!
Portability to other processor families is boring and routine, so much so that Linux, which was deliberately designed from the outset as an x86 OS kernel is now ported to more hardware than almost any other OS (the notable exception being that king of the frontier, NetBSD).
NB Windows 2000, the latest "portable" NT kernel, is available on how many different CPU architectures? Answer: One. Microsoft abandoned the support for other processors as soon as their claims had won them market share, features mean nothing in the face of all those nodding IA32 admins who got an MCSE out of their cereal box.
Nick.
Given that you work for Microsoft and given the capitalistic culture of this company, it may be a stretch to imagine that folks write code for the fun of it!
Dude, that is staggeringly offensive. What kind of person do you think I am? All of us love to code here, even the testers, even the PMs. Hell, probably the maintenance people code when they aren't sweeping.
Maybe you think MS is evil, but don't assume its employees are all soulless idiots as well.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
E.g. In the late 80's, IBM, a much larger company than Microsoft, tried to dominate the operating system's market. What did they use? OS/2. We all know how well OS/2 fared! Why? Because it was not even close to the quality of Microsoft's product: Windows 3.1.
You do realize that OS/2 was a Microsoft product up to OS/2 1.3, don't you? (Wish I'd kept those floppyies labelled "MS OS/2". They'd have been good for a laugh.)
Do you even realize that Windows NT was originally an offshoot of OS/2? (Both Microsoft and IBM had, per joint agreement, rights to the OS/2 1.0 to 1.3 code bases, as it had been developed by both companies jointly.)
To see Microsoft's true innovation, though, look at Windows NT, that came out soon afterwards. With innovations like preemptive multitasking, virtual memory...
And then he goes on to list those features that OS/2 had and Win 3.1 lacked!!
The cake is a pie
Of course, OS/2 did have one major problem with its multitasking--it only had one input queue shared by all programs (at least for the keyboard, I don't remember whether this was true of the mouse). So if one program stalled with input waiting in the queue, nobody got their input. As much as I wanted OS/2 to kick M$'s tukus, I remember running into that one a few times and being fairly disenchanted.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
Did you want me to restate it 100 times fast for you? Is your mind incapable of understanding?
> With innovations like preemptive multitasking, virtual memory, and, something that had never been done before in the industry -- Portability to other processor families -- NT represented a technological leap beyond any of its competitors in the Unix world.
:-)
;-)
Why don't you take an Operating Systems course and learn a little bit about history. Unix had done ALL that before NT did.
If you're trying to be funny, you might to tack on an emoticon next time. i.e. something like
Cheers
Software is like sex... if you had to pay for it, you got screwed. Oh wait, thats not right...
What did they use? OS/2. We all know how well OS/2 fared! Why? Because it was not even close to the quality of Microsoft's product: Windows 3.1. And,
I wouldn't even mention Windows 3.1 and.
OS/2 in same paragraph when talking about quality. Yes, Win 3.1 was lot better than really crappy Win 3.0, but for example memory handling and multitasking was far behind OS/2.
Rather than quality, in my opinion, marketing, big promises and stupidy are reasons behind Microsoft's success. Allthough, I'd must admit that in reacent years Microsoft has improved it's quality. Windows NT 4.0 is stable (after many SPs) ja Win2000 can be that too. I'm NT user myself..
if you want to talk innovation, look at the Windows 3.1 interface. Where do you think those early versions of IBM's product (OS/2) got their interface ideas?
Both OS/2 2.0 and Windows 3.1 were released in year 1992. User interface in OS/2 was far more advanced, it had object desktop etc. Windows 95 introduced interface which had many simiraties to OS/2 2.0, so I'd say Windows 95 took influence from OS/2.
Microsoft is innovative, but all innovations aren't that good. Remember Bob or original MSN...
Wow. That has got to be the most successful troll I've seen in recent memory. All of you folks that replied to this blubbering "OS/2 was great... Amiga had multitasking first...{whinewhinewhine}", I hope you're embarrased- he's just yanking your chain. I had hopes the Slashdot populace was a little more intelligent than to fall for that.
--
314-15-9265
LOL bullcrap.
I have a 'light' slackware setup here with a 486 and 8mb.
it takes yonks to start up any X application.
For example, Netscape took 26 minutes.
I think most customers of Microsoft are mostly happy. There are serious problems with all of Microsoft's products, but in most cases those problems are more acceptable than the problems with the alternatives.
Linux has strengths in areas where Microsoft has weaknesses, but for most people those strengths do not currently outweigh its weaknesses where Microsoft has strengths.
They never will entirely. Linux will gain more and more market share, but will never put Microsoft out of business.
Currently Microsoft has no reason to support Linux because it can make more money by not supporting Linux. People are still willing to forgo the advantages of Linux for the advantages of Windows.
In the future, Linux will probably overcome most of those advantages so that most people would switch to Linux, except for one important fact. Microsoft is moving at the same time as Linux.
Microsoft is fully prepared to give away its operating system for free, not because it wants to, but because it will have no choice eventually.
But Microsoft will attempt to hold on to the operating system as long as it can. By including Internet Explorer in the system it has gained a stay of execution for Windows.
Linux with Netscape is currently not nearly as acceptable an option for most people as Windows with IE is.
In the future Linux might catch up. If/when it does, Microsoft can jump onto the Linux bandwagon along with everyone else.
Microsoft has been multiplatform since forever. Wine will work just as effectively for Microsoft as it has for Corel. Better in fact, because Microsoft will be able to convert parts of Windows to be compilable under Linux.
As soon as they find that they are losing market share by not providing their software on Linux they will provide it.
They still have operating systems over and above that.
Microsoft Office is also an operating system. You write programs for it etc.
Visual C++, Visual Basic, etc. can also be moved.
We are moving in that direction in any case. Even if Microsoft never ports anything, Linux will work seamlessly with Windows. There are many solutions which allow Windows to run under Linux and Linux to run under Windows. Most of them currently have severe tradeoffs, but it won't stay that way.
Microsoft Windows might eventually have to be almost given away, but Microsoft will still have control over a large segment of the market.
--SolidGold
--SolidGold
Everything you know is wrong. Or more accurately, inaccurate.
Actually, Windows 9x DO use pre-emptive multitasking. I also seem to remember MS and IBM cooperatively making OS/2, and then MS split off and turned what they had from OS/2 into NT. This isn't related to the person I replied to, but I've seen it posted in this thread about OS/2 being "true 32-bit" before NT was. I thought OS/2 STILL contains 16-bit code?
Early versions of OS/2 were developed jointly by IBM and MS as a successor to DOS, not to Win3.1 (which was released in 1991). OS/2 was supposed to be the joing MS/IBM product in response to the MacOS.
And the same is true today.
Seldom does one person gets rich off of a program or series of programs today.
It is the corportation and the shareholders who make the money. (And really, only Microsoft)
Back in the days Bill made this statement, the market for programmers was if you were employed by someone else. The PC was TRS-80's and Apple ][+es. The people getting fat, dumb and happy on other people's wallets were the hardware makers. And this too has not changed. How many billion+ dollar software companies are there? How many billion+ dollar companies make hardware, hardware that without software is no more useful than a badly designed space heater?
Bill is our whipping boy because, well, he should have been taken out back behind the woodshed years ago. (Let us also take the PC vendors out back also, because none had the balls to hold a press conference and announce they would be willing to shut the doors to their company rather than sign the contract Micro$oft gave them.) But let us not loose sight that Bill did have a point. And his point DID manage to 'win'.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Sure it was nowhere near as recognised and well-known as it is now. Neither were computers widespread. However, OSS is merely a return to that philosophy of sharing software in order to make it better. Scrap all the words after "sharing software" in that last sentence if you're a GNUer!
You're right though when you say that OSS is a logical progression. Many people have got totally hacked off with the cack that is passed for software, mostly (but not exclusively) from Microsoft. Like an article at Linuxworld.com said, we have Bill and his company to thank for making RMS's arguments for him.
I realize tha Bill Gates is like the greatest man on earth, *laugh* but do we need a full interview posted? I could have dealt with a summary and a link to another page with the full posting. Besides, why is this news now? Wasn't it done 20 years ago?
If you want my respect, give it first...
If you don't want my respect, expect mine before you give it.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Yesterday makes tomorrow possible. One thing that seperates humans from animals is we don't just live in the moment.
Thank you for that very true piece of thought there. It is the things that happen in the past that give a frame of refernce to what we do today - how can we improve our lives without something we can compare against?
You really need to go and sit down, have a nice cup of hot chocolate and think about the meaning of the word humour...
What all this says to me is something I've always known. We _all_ have reasons to do what we do. There's nothing to hold against anyone to do what they choose, because they have all very legitimate reasons. Even Hitler (not comparable to Bill Gates, comparable to all of us wether we like it or not). Everyone have issues to live through.
But at some point in time it's time to say: Game over! Enough is enough. Let's wake up from this dream of ours and start living again.
- Steeltoe (sane, but drunk this tschime)
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
One of the things it mentioned was the infamous letter to the Homebrew Computer Club, a hyperlink to which was in the comments above. In brief, it was a letter, from Gates, which nagged the users about taking software and not paying for it; there are a few other incidents along these lines in the book.
If you grab a copy of Hackers, by Steven Levy, this kind of behavior along with cease/desist requests to software pirates, is adequately documented.
I also agree that commercial software serves a purpose - then and now.
What I don't agree with, and one of the reasons why many people find BG an arrogant jerk, is that people who PAID for the software were not able to make full use of it in the way that open source users can now.
A lot of people have mentioned here that the software industry is unlike any other. In no other industry would people routinely accept products that don't work as advertised, or products that broke all the time, or products that were unreasonably incompatible with other products. If you BUY it, then you should be able to make it work the way you want.
It's actually all similar to the DVD issue going on right now. Illegal copying may be a side effect, but the intent is that people who have *legal* copies can get more/full/better use from it. That's the issue (as I see it) - not necessarily having to pay.
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
I don't quite say it this way.
But when I'm complaining about the ethics of MS, I am often told I'm just jealous of Bill Gates. Each time I'm told this, I pause a moment to see if anything has changed since the last time I thought about it, but the answer is always the same: "If having his money meant I'd have to be like him . . . well . . . I'd rather be me."
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
Didn't the GNU project alredy existed by 1980? (I actually don't know, but I think so).
On the other hand, DOS and windows are the reason why everybody uses computers. The secretaries on my father's office often call me with stupid questins about windows, I can't imagine if they where using GNU/<something>.
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Bill Gates is a dessicated mummy wrapped in dusty, rotting bindings called Microsoft. He will never be resurrected. Furthermore, the bindings now are being stripped from the mummy in broken pieces by the OSS movement, and they disintegrating as they come off. It will not be long now before the mummy will fall apart and its parts will be scattered until they are dust.
Erchie
Whether you agree or not with copyright, you still have to go along with the original author's decision to release their code in the fashion that they choose. Their code == their choice. However, in today's world you don't necesarily need to use that app / solution / whatever.
You have the choice to use free software for most things. I use Linux for everything, and I'm able to read peoples word documents and do everything I used to. And I have the option of contributing back. So I do.
So I guess you show them they're wrong by using an open solution and denying them the profits. If they still want to develop in that style, that's their choice. Their funeral.
VMS! VMS! VMS! heeheh.
"..Constructive critizism is always welcome however."
but now that the GNU is around, bill gates is old.
he did what he had to do in our effed-up society, to get to the very top.
i love the line, "people are not getting rich selling software" or whatever the exact syntax was.. it's just so funny that the richest man to ever walk the planet once said that people couldn't get rich doing what he got rich doing. the richest, in fact.
he accomplished, humungously, what he once declared was impossible. imagine that! imagine that twenty years from now, i could be in court because my company is about to be disbanded because of my horrible business practices, and it's all based on me saying today "people just can't get rich from selling home videos", or something..! damn that's just too much!
but i bet i'm one of the only
"..Constructive critizism is always welcome however."
My opinion is that it's why there are different distributions. They are earning quite a lot of cash and they can afford (and also do it) to pay lots of people to do appropriate documentation and all these applications that are needed for distribution, but that are not the stuff one would do gladly for free.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I remember one quote, I think it was from Microsoft's CFO on how to watch for MS (or any other company) getting into financial trouble. The guy stated that you should look for significant changes in accounting practices. So if you ever notice that MS makes a big change in how they keep their books, run.
Actually, you can see Mr. Stallman's first e-mail about the GNU project here. The GNU project wasn't started until 1983, so Bill couldn't have know about it.
You are an idiot. Just because some fool moderator slips with [his|her] mouse when scoring this doesn't mean it is no longer funny. A reply laughing at the joke, may be adding a little to it, and maybe pointing the mistake out the moderator would have been by far the best response- and you were first to reply. If I had moderator points I'd deduct 5 from you for being dumb.
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
Bunch of donkeys. Think before you flame.
---
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
gates was bashing programmers for being "thieves" when they circulated his little basic, way back when.
then he builds his empire and becomes the figurehead for closed systems.
now the "thieves" are making a comeback.
i don't really feel the force of microsoft's power any more. i haven't used windows in ages and i've actually grown sort of indifferent about them, since they don't really affect me much anymore.
it almost seems like gates is on his way to becoming just a glitch in the tradition of computing. the free exchange of ideas in the computing world seems to be the norm, actually... gates is sort-of like a temporary plague of locusts.
Windows NT is not 100% 32 bit, it still uses patches of 16 for backwards compatability. NT is pretty unstable too because of MSs worst idea ever...the registry. Also leave OS/2 out of this, IBM has made so many mistakes, it's just not fair to rub it in. OS/2 was a decent OS for it's time. IBM has previously suffered from a total lack of foresight.
Munky_v2
Jay
Where was that proven? I do tech support for Windows and guess what...If I can make the hardware work under Linux / Unix / BSD, it's not defective. So I am very intersted in where you got your figures.
Munky_v2
Jay
G: We put flexibility into the ROM which isn't documented at all, and which is not sold as a feature on the thing.
THE EVOLUTION OF MICROSOFT
1980s- "It's not a feature, it's a bug"
1990s- "It's not a bug, it's a feature."
One of the things he seems most irate about is that people could possibly want more out of his program than he gave them, and that they were able to get it. I'm proud to see that the power of Open Source was felt even back then.
Does anyone else get the feeling that sometime between then and now the Patents Office just gave up trying to stop people from patenting things? Now it seems you can just patent whatever you damn well want, however illogical.
Why the hell do I want to read this? We all know nothing has changed and since I hate anything BG says automatically I could think of worse torture (well, actually I can, but I'd thought I'd spare you from the gross details)
I have always wondered what had happen iot the cake (which was in his face in Belgium) contained a lethal poison. I'd probally still be partying, but that's beside mypoint, what was I talking about? I forgot and am too lazy to look a couple of lines above what I'm typing now so I guess I'll quit typing.Thank you for your patience if you actually read this message.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Morbo:Is it just me...
Nixon:Or do these guys...
M:Have a problem...
N:With interrupting...
M:One another constantly?
Gates: Okay, I have my billions, my solid gold house and my rocket car...I gotta go! See ya!
G: Well, you have to have exp... You know, if somebody's camouflaged the thing pretty well... That's a question of fact, not of law. The question is, did they borrow from my work, okay? [...]
Interesting subject, because... what if you port GPL code to another programming language, or better, you snip out a part of the code and recode it because you use the idea behind the code, in your own code. Borrowing, or theft and THUS voilation of copyright law because voilation of the GPL... any thoughts?
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Maybe in the future software will be like fire. Right now, software is like fire made by a caveman, who had to spend hours and hours rubbing two sticks together.
Now, if the hunters come back from the kill, and put sticks in the fire without giving the fire-maker any meat, that is plainly wrong.
The only way the fire-maker can protect himself is to wave a torch in their faces. It's sad but true.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I have about 5 years of NT experience. I started using it to solve real-world business problems before a huge portion of the IT community even knew it existed. At my place of work at the time (a field office of a cabinet-level Government agency) I became the leading proponent of NT deployment for both the server and workstation space. I was interested in using NT on Intel to run mainframes off the site. An NT system architecture I devised for a particular business need became the model for the entire Federal Government.
I offer the above information in hopes of proving that I am not a knee-jerk MS or NT basher.
Having said that, I feel that MS did a remarkable thing in developing NT, but I do NOT believe that all of NT (or even most of it, for that matter) represents an MS innovation. IIRC, NT and OS/2 are both results of work performed my MS and IBM in partnership, and when that partnership dissolved (less than amicably, I understand), the work done up to that point was shared by both partners. OS/2 and NT both can only claim mixed pedigree, and one of the things that you cite as one of the significant innovations NT represents - portability across processors (as embodied in the NT Hardware Abstraction Layer) - would have had to have been given birth to during the most active period of that MS/IBM partnership.
I want to insert here that as exciting as the HAL concept was for the future of NT (I was certainly excited about the prospect of running NT on any machine alive), we can see how that turned out. MS initially released NT to run on Intel x86, DEC Alpha, and MIPS CPUs, and the PowerPC CPU was added later. Well, MIPS and then PPC were dropped and I feel that Alpha might be the next to go. Development of a HAL is FAR from trivial and pretty much cannot get off the ground for any CPU without INTENSE MS cooperation. My belief is that regardless of any original intent otherwise, NT portability across CPUs became used as a competitive weapon: "I don't want your CPU/platform to flourish; I hereby revoke NT availability for you!"
Digital's VMS had pre-emptive multitasking and virtual memory starting in 1978 (meaning no disrepect to any kind of UNIX). The Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking with a GUI as part of the operating system in 1985. And, IIRC, MS Windows arose directly from MS' encounter with the Apple Lisa, which in turn got its impetus from prototype work done by Xerox (which Xerox did not deem worthy of further development). You can't paint IBM as being derivative for boosting OS/2 GUI without getting some of that same paint on MS.
So, while I admire the work MS did with NT post-IBM-partnership, I cannot accept your view of the degree to which NT represents genuine innovation onthe part of MS - and I certainly don't admire how difficult and expensive MS has made NT to work with and actually utilize. That, more than anything else, was what initially drove me to take an interest in Linux.
Wow, pretty big talk for someone that still thought that no one would ever need more than 640k of RAM.
kwsNI
He is arguing the case for copyright protection. There's nothing paternalistic about wanting copyright protection ( which musicians and artists had for years )
If "years" means since 1972, that is! Printed music had protection, but recorded music did not until then. It's not simple. And realize I conducted this interview in 1980, only eight years after analog music recordings could be copyrighted. Furthermore, the issue hadn't yet been resolved. Datacash vs. JS&A really made 'em nuts in 1979, and the Copyright Office was refusing object code.
The real philosophical question (which he avoided, and all 300+ posts on /. have avoided) is about object code. Regardless of the creativity required to produce its source, the object code is indeed a machine part. This was never settled in the courts; it was settled by legislation that granted copyright to object code, and messed up even more later with patents granted to software. It made a mess of copyright and patent concepts ... and we're seeing those roosting ramifications in the whole DVD nightmare.
Dennis
When I originally submitted this Bill Gates piece to /. I provided some commentary, but the focus was on how my piece No Money (Lullaby for Bill) came about, being derived from Gates's voice.
Then I turned up the full interview transcript. It was more interesting for /. and so I was asked to write a new preface for the interview. Alas, the original brief article didn't make it. Instead, I posted it here on my Malted/Media site:
http://maltedmedia.com/books/pape rs/sf-gates.html
Dennis
FYI - They still hold a Color Computer show in the Chicago area each year. It is billed as the ##th Last Annual CoCo Fest and is sponsored by Glenside Color Computer Club. Dennis Báthory-Kitsz has even been known to attend. Even though Tandy gave up on the CoCo long ago, it is still in use and new hardware in the form of Hard Drive interfaces, memory upgrades etc. are still being produced and introduced for it!
I haven't read a lot of current gates/MS generated media spin, but if this was what he was doing 20 years ago, I'm suprised he's not a lot more teflon now.
If Bill Gates didn't have such an excessive amount of money I very much doubt he'd donate to charities. With the amount that he's got it's not like he's going to miss it much - and what would he do with it once he's dead anyway? I'm sure he'll make sure his family are all as well off as they need to be. His motivation for donating to charities is more likely from the boost in public opinion that it'll give him rather than a desire to help people.
Though I'd prefer to assume this is a troll, I'm too damn cynical to do so. So just a few quick points on your claimed Microsoft innovations:
Pre-emptive multitasking - WRONG. This wasn't even the first desktop OS to sport this feature. AmigaDOS beat them to it back in 1985
Virtual memory - WRONG. This was supported in 3BSD, back in 1979
Portability to other processor families - WRONG. This wasn't even new for Microsoft, who released Xenix on Intel, Motrolla and Zialog back in 1980.
I have a brother who lives in Oregon. He stated that Bill brokered an agreement with the WA state authorities over taxes. Part of the agreement included certain charitable contributions. I don't recall the papers he mentioned that covered the story up there.
What? You can go and die if you want but if I was in Bill's shoes I would do something useful with all that money for a change.
-Remember, if something good ever happens it will one way or another turn to crap.
I think most people are missing the underlying reason Microsoft products are successful. As much as those who are jealous of Bill Gates' status as the richest man in the world like to say otherwise, Microsoft's products are of incredibly high quality.
E.g. In the late 80's, IBM, a much larger company than Microsoft, tried to dominate the operating system's market. What did they use? OS/2. We all know how well OS/2 fared! Why? Because it was not even close to the quality of Microsoft's product: Windows 3.1. And, if you want to talk innovation, look at the Windows 3.1 interface. Where do you think those early versions of IBM's product (OS/2) got their interface ideas?
To see Microsoft's true innovation, though, look at Windows NT, that came out soon afterwards. With innovations like preemptive multitasking, virtual memory, and, something that had never been done before in the industry -- Portability to other processor families -- NT represented a technological leap beyond any of its competitors in the Unix world.
While I realize that most of the readership of Slashdot worships such lowly knaves as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, it must be pointed out that a large percentage of the readership of Slashdot uses a non-Microsoft operating system, so you can hardly trust their judgement to be impartial. It comes as no surprise, then, that they so willingly disrespect the man who (whether they like it or not) will lead them into the next millennium.
Although the Old English days of feudalism have been over for some time, and monarchies these days are pretty much symbolic and nothing more, Bill Gates somehow stands above all of this. Gates is the closest thing that the Earth of the year 2000 has to royalty. He is truly a king, a prince among men, a man who is loved by many, but who is plagued by a clandestine army of thieving back-stabbers who would do anything to topple his empire, usurp his authority, and turn everything over to utter chaos.
I'm talking about Linux users, of course, and about *BSD and Macintosh users as well. Computer users have a responsiblity to pay homage to the appropriate parties. In this case, the appropriate party is Bill Gates and his Microsoft Corporation. When you openly refuse to use a Microsoft operating system, you are committing an act of treason against the very monarchy that is holding the computing industry together. I can't speak for Gates, but I am sure that he is not amused by you people, and he is not amused by the crimes that you have committed against him by refusing to bow to his benevolent and stable command.
You people owe it to Gates. You owe it to Microsoft. If it weren't for Microsoft, you wouldn't have your high-end personal computer running Linux. If it weren't for Microsoft, you wouldn't have Linux at all. It is a well-known fact that Linus Torvalds used MS-DOS's EDIT.EXE to write the initial bootstrap assembly code for Linux. And yet Torvalds peddles Linux as if it is his invention, never once revealing the truth that Bill Gates and the Microsoft Corporation played a pivotal role in the development of this "operating system."
So let me take this opportunity to advise all of you rogues to listen to what Gates has to say here. Listen very carefully. The day may come when you are made to answer for your complete lack of respect. When that day comes, I will be on the right side. Where will you be? Think about that one, long and hard. Gates truly is a prince. Do you really want to defy the prince?
Think about it.
B-K: How can it be proven that it is in fact your work?
G: How can it be proven that it's my work? I'll get, you know, any number of experts to testify that it's my work. It's quite simple. It's proof in a court of law.
I nearly snorted coffee outta my nose on that one. I wonder if that was the strategy used in the MS-DOJ case... looks like Gates was just as willing to interpret law for the rest of the world then as he did in the antitrust case. Not surprising *that* backfired on him... :^)
I should consider writing a humor article on this one... ah ripe ammunition... smells like victory! :^)
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
The values of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
I guess they should have coughed up the $$$ to buy an altair to develop on rather than stealing $40,000 worth of computer tine from Harvard!
Surely, the first step should have been a simple keyboard interface, a bootstrap loader, and an assembler. The cost of all of that put together would have been WELL under $40,000.
We haven't answered all of the questions surrounding making a living at Free Software, but surely forming an 'Evil Empire' TM, pat pend. wasn't anything like an optimal solution!
"Look, Redhat's making money and giving away their software! So is Debian! Blah blah blah!"
Well, actually, as a volunteer organization, Debian isn't making money.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
or better yet, why don't we compare what he was saying to what bill joy (co-founder of sun microsystems) was doing with berkeley unix! you can read about it in the book open sources.
bill gates cared nothing for the technology and i think that is what is the most offensive about him. sure it's great to make money but don't lie and say that distributing source code presents no money making opportunity. bill just wanted to make money his way and he wasn't being up front about that. it's a good thing that now people are realizing that open source makes sense. it always has that's why we're still using some of the stuff that joy helped create over 20 years ago!
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
Looking where Gates was asked if the courts were willing to protect the work given away by computer clubs, he defended by stating
"the courts are basically looking for equity solutions,and when you have somebody creating a work, and putting a lot of effort into that, and you have somebody else who is giving it away, the court is looking for the equity of the situation."
If I interpret this correctly, it states the courts are willing to defend the party that is producing the work.
If the courts still defend the parties that produce the work, why are bogus patents and copyright "trade secrets" allowed to be used as extortion against hobbyists?
The incentive for sharing source code freely (what you generalized as "OSS") is not to "defeat MS", but to share code so that folks can learn from each other and innovate faster - i.e., we do not have to "reinvent the wheel".
Given that you work for Microsoft and given the capitalistic culture of this company, it may be a stretch to imagine that folks write code for the fun of it!
In interviews of the major developers in the OSS community (Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Paul Vixie,...) none of them have said that the reason they wrote X program was to crush Microsoft. On the contrary, most of them said "I need a program that does X. That program either does not exist or is too expensive, so I'll just write it myself and share my efforts with others.
The "crush MS" sentiment is largely a product of media hype and those ignorant of the history and importance of OSS. Given the amount of work involved in writing things such as the GNU tools, BIND, PERL, and the Linux kernel, something as petty as "crush MS" would not have the motivation or staying power that has occurred over the past 25 years. Cheers!
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
I assume you are the author of the first post in thos thread - if so I didn't realise you were being serious.
Having programmed on OS/2, Windows NT (briefly under 3.51) and a number of Unix flavours, I found your assertions laughable. OS/2 came on floppies because nearly all software did at the time. I've never seen a software locker with a copy of Windows 3 that wasn't on floppies. Even the copy of Windows NT 3.51 came on floppies. The last version of OS/2 that I used came on a CD-ROM though.
Anyway comparing Windows `today' (your word) to OS/2 1.2 is totally bogus. It's also wrong. Windows 95 and 98 do not feature pre-emptive multi tasking, but the shitty co-operative kind. NT was a rehash of VMS commisioned by Microsoft when they fell out with IBM.
I've long thought that Dave Cutler (the designer of VMS and NT) must have left MS shortly after NT 3.51 was released. It's been a dog of an operating system ever since. The early reviews of Windows 2000 I have seen don't suggest it's going to get much better either.
Chris Wareham
The reasons for NT being successfull are:
1) Complacency on IBM's part. They knew they had an excellent product on their hands, but failed to encourage develoers to produce applications for it. Most application developers were locked into early versions of Windows already.
2) Microsoft's superb marketing skill. Don't forget that this is the company who redesigned the look and feel of Windows 3.11 and convinced the world that does was no longer part of Windows 95.
3) NT had a design goal which stated it should look like Windows 3.11. This meant people assumed it was an easy transition from Windows 3.11 to Windows NT. The 'object oriented' interface (pioneered by Smalltalk and Stepstone engineers years before) came later.
You are a fool if you mean to imply that NT outsold OS/2 on technical merit. NT 3.51 was an enourmous resource hog that ran on a very restricted list of hardware. NT 4.0 broke the original design of NT and OS/2 to improve performance but in doing so threw stability out of the window.
Now don't bother replying. If your the Anonymous Coward responsible for most of the pro-NT remarks in this thread then you are either very ill-informed or simply deluded.
Chris Wareham
I would be very suprised if Dave Cutler's early designs for NT didn't feature a number of ideas from VMS. You don't design such a thing as an operating system and then ignore those ideas for the next one.
... between the near daily reboots due to NT's joke implementation of SMP.
As for the stablility of VMS - I have never seen a Vax crash. They still grind away at the back of many major companies because it would be too difficult and pointless to replace them. The only companies I know of that have switched from VMS had the following reasons:
1) The vendor had stopped supporting a key application they were using on VMS.
2) Ignorant managers felt a change was needed.
In the second category was one of my former employers. The company had an enormous database on a single Vax. Management decided to move it NT - as VMS programmers are a scarce resource, and in the words of the boss 'we should consolidate on Microsoft'. There's nothing like putting all your eggs in one (incompatible) basket.
Several colleagues spent many frustrating months trying to get a dual Pentium Pro 200 Compaq server to replicate the performance and reliability of the Vax. Two years later the Vax is still chugging away serving the whole company, and the Compaq is being used as a file server for 15 people
Chris Wareham
Although it doesn't account for that important fact, it's a fair comparison and not "wrong." After all, metaphors are good or bad, not right or wrong. Metaphors by nature tend to be oversimplifications anyway.
He is right about the second comment, in a way, but in the context of freely distributed software, he doesn't understand what "expensive" really means.
"Expensive", in terms of open source/bazaar software, is measured in units of *glamour* rather than units of *money*.[...]
Yes, Gates was talking strictly in a money-driven context. The PD programmers of the day got little notice (the "glamour") unless they could publish their work in a magazine, newsletter or the like. Yet, many of them still made programs mostly out of their own independent satisfaction of accomplishment. The GNU project knows this well and stays true to that ideal. RMS doesn't need units of glamour in place of money or seek praise for his efforts, and that's the real spirit of free software that Bill Gates ran up against even then.
---
So, whether you like it or not, as a MS employee you implicitly share the sentiments of B.G.
If you don't agree with your companies ideals, then why work there?
---
This is untrue. Being one who agrees with the use of capitalism as a means to distribute software and turn a profit does not mean that you cannot agree with at least some of the ideas of the free software community. They are not at all mutually exclusive.
Most people do not consider access to code a 'right', but many can understand the more tangible benefits to open-source software. Scalability, robustness, and lack of marketting influence.
However, it's not hard to find problems as well. Lack of funding for certain things developers can't do being the biggest: licensing of codecs (QuickTime anyone?), marketting, and my favorite: usability testing. There are number of poorly thought out user interfaces in free software projects. This requires a great deal of testing, a scientific process which takes some cash.
Anyhow, there are benefits to each. While I don't agree with HOW Microsoft abuses capitalism in what they do, there are a number of companies that are pretty ethical, and have damn good software.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I wonder if they're aware of the price they must pay to be Bill Gates. Maybe we should create a movie: "Being Bill Gates"... ought to be an interesting surreal world. We'd start with the UNIX Ewoks and just go from there. Bill payed a steep price for his dollars.. I'm not sure it's the way I'd want to make my millions, if I made them at all. Just some food for thought...
>From the posts that I've seen so far, it seems like many people are forgetting when this took place.
Perhaps. But I feel even more telling was a roundtable discussion in the latest IEEE Internet Computer Magazine (readable at http://computer.org/internet/v4n1/index.htm ) which included such Internet illuminaries as Carl Malamud, Bill Joy, & Bob Metcalfe. And Bill Gates was included for some reason; prolly because he was CEO of Microsoft.
Where the various contributors talked about the great projects they worked on in the past (e.g. Joy), or how the technology will change society in the future (e.g. Metcalfe), Gates focussed on how much money there is to make from the Internet. And didn't appear to care too much about the technology associated with the Internet -- where Lawrence Roberts shared an interesting graph showing how the price of delivering a tetrabit of data has fallen & will continue to fall over the years, Gates made a pitch for the Clear Type technology. (And forgetting to mention that it was originally developed by Apple.)
I can't help but feel that if a cure for the common cold were announced tomorrow, where most people would comment about how much it would help mankind, Gates would be figuring out a way to take over the technology & make another dozen billion dollars from it. Then complaining that he was being kept from innovating by a bunch of narrow-minded busy-bodies who are jealous of his successes.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Actually, this isn't really correct. You can make more money by printing more. The problem is that you devalue your currency by doing this. Likewise, with software, you devalue the software, and consequently the author's creative work when you reproduce it.
You might laugh when BG loses a few dollars, but it's not nearly as funny when a small time shareware author or font designer gets screwed because of it.
The bulk of ``high performance'' computing needs are best served by closed source solutions ( commercial UNIX and mainframes ). As for ``expert'', the expert musicians, and graphic designers aren't switching to Linux until there's more ( probably closed source ) software available.
That doesn't alter the fact that someone who works hard at their job as a developer has the right to be duly compensated.
But when a coder comes up with something interesting, he need only send word to freshmeat.net, and the world gets this innovation, at almost no cost to anyone.
It cost the coder time and effort, and they have every right to be compensated for their time and effort.
At least he couldn't imagine that happening on the scale we're seeing today.
Whether he could or not is orthogonal to the point that he had the right to be compensated.
You might think that ripping off the fruits of someone's creative efforts is funny. Maybe it is when it happens to someone with billions of dollars. However, it's totally unfunny when a small time shareware author or a small time font designer gets screwed out of their income because their users are too dishonest to pay up.
You have every right to copy the work, as long as the author is duely compensated for their labor. The author is entitled to receive compensation from each person using their work. If I use a service provided by someone, that person has the right to compensation.
Depending on how you do this, you may be violating the copyright on the work in question.
Not at all. I can read a book without paying the author a cent. I can sing a song without paying the songwriter (unless I'm getting paid to sing, basically). I can use the copy of MS Word on my father's computer
Yes, because the copyrights permit you to do all of those things. But IMO, the author has the right to choose how their material should be licenses ( within the reasonable bounds of basic consumer protection laws and ethics ). I'd argue that there's nothing wrong with an author licensing a book on a pay-to-read basis, though a printed distribution format would certainly make this kind of license difficult to enforce.
But having creators get paid by using government force preventing the making of copies is ethically questionable,
You could equally argue that it is somehow ethically questionable for the government to prevent you from counterfeiting money. THe issue is very similar -- when you counterfeit money, you are leeching off the people who are really producing something, because you are undermining the currency. And when you distribute illegal copies, you are undermining the value of the authors work.
and with the advent of digital media is not practical.
I don't buy this. Copyright protection works most of the time in countries that properly recognise copyright law. I am not clear what your new model is. I suppose it's one which doesn't require you to pay anything. That model works well if you're the one who doesn't have to pay, as opposed to the one who doesn't get paid ( or the one who has to pay your share )
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my dubious pleasure to announce the emergence of a new life form, unique to ./ : The Moderator Troll. An attack by such a creature can cause momentary loss of control and instantaneous flamage in victims otherwise more level-headed, as it comes from a direction that was before thought of as secure. But we know now, don't we?
Be Alert! Trust no one! Keep your laser handy!
Of course, I might be wrong, the moderator could have actually been a moron, and by declaring the existence of the moderator troll I could be creating it. But I don't think so; I've been seeing really weird things in M2.
All this said, I must take my hat off to the guy who suckered so many into flamage just by clicking on a list and a button, iff it was done on purpose, of course. Goes without saying that you should take moderation scores with a grain of salt under all circumstances: look at this thread and say it isn't true...
This is why we will never see anything open-source come out of Microsoft. The idea of releasing source code in order to create a better program is utterly foreign to Bill Gates. He just doesn't get it.
The whole interview stinks of this pompous "What's mine is mine!" attitude, which is what has made him and Microsoft what it is today.
________________________________
Objectively, I agree with a lot of what he's saying. I believe you should be able to copyright software, and that people shouldn't be able to give it away if you don't want them to (on the flip side, I'm a strong supporter of open source/free software. I think people should be allowed to sell their stuff, they just shouldn't expect me to buy it). I think it may have been stupid for them not to give out information about their source code, but it wasn't necessarily immoral.
;-)
On the other hand, throughout the whole interview BG comes across as highly defensive and easily upset. He keeps getting into small arguments with the guy, even when he's just being asked simple questions.
But I think the most amusing part is how BG himself is all upset because of how wrong it is to steal other people's software and make money from it. I've lost track of how many times MS has done this
David
What is that bit about [end side one. Discussion about clones missed.]? Now that's something I'd be curious and frightened of. My god, a never ending stream of Bill Gates. Clone after clone, after clone.
-cpd
Man, those were the days. A whopping 2MHz of 8/16-bit (hybrid) power. You could use a POKE command from BASIC to double your clock speed (by turning off the RAM refresh!) And The OS-9 operating system was The Stuff! I was soooo proud when I wrote my first OS-9 program in assembly language (a utility to strip TAB characters out of text files, I think it was).
A friend and I were having a discussion recently about how his kids didn't seem very interested in computers, except as a game system, like their Nintendo 64. When he and I were around his older son's age (14 or 15), we were both delving into "serious" programming ("serious" in that we spent a lot of time and effort learning how to program in BASIC, 6809 assembly, Pascal, C, or whatever we could get our hands on). We would spend hours tediously typing in source code from RAINBOW magazine for some simple little game or utility. In college, I started to write my own BBS software, implementing a circular queue for the message base, before I had even learned what a circular queue was.
Because of the "hobbyist" nature of computing in those days, and because we had to do so much of it ourselves (there wasn't a plethora of commercial software to choose from), we learned a lot about computer hard/software out of necessity. Plus, we had the satisfaction of knowing that we could sit down at a computer, spend a few hours (or perhaps a few days) hacking out code, and turn out a game or utility that *was* as good as any commercial software that existed at the time!
Kids these days don't really have that kind of incentive. The current games and apps are turned out by teams of programmers and artists, with thousands of man-hours behind them. Gone are the days of the lone hobbyist releasing a new version of the "dir" command to an audience eager to receive it. Why should a kid today bother to learn how to program, when he'll never be able to create the next Pong, let alone the next Final Fantasy VIII?
What's left today to get kids excited about learning more about a computer than how to right-click an icon? Porn and MP3 piracy? I think if we were to draw a graph of "Available Programming Talent over Time", we'd start seeing a dip around now. We've gone past the wellspring of inspired, enthusiastic, self-taught hackers. Granted, we'll still see a few of those here and there, but they will be the exception rather than the rule. The rule of cookie-cutter, carbon-copied, MIS grads who wouldn't know a JNE instruction if it bit them on their asses, and who wouldn't know an opamp from a demultiplexer if you showed them the datasheets.
Raise your hand if you ever soldered something directly to your motherboard. The rest of you, go back to your latte and Java For Dummies books.
--
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III / NIC Handle: EMC3
Got Spam? http://spam.gunters.org/
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III
geek ramblings
Hey Havoc! Is that your Dad that was pissing BillG off? That's pretty cool.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Hmm, if around 10% of Altair owners bought his product, then his maximal market was ten times what they were making.
10 * $2/hour = $20/hour, minus overhead, divided between the people in the company...
What a businessman! The highest possible profit came close to janitor wages. I sure can see why people listen to him about how to run a business.
I'm sure he would have done fine if his Mom hadn't gotten him that sweet PC-DOS contract, and his parents didn't provide him with the $50,000 (or was it $20k?) to buy QDOS, and IBM didn't do the actual work of making QDOS into usable PC-DOS and give him back all of their work, providing an extendable near-monopoly and all the money that hired people to do the rest (besides setting a policy of "screw whoever it takes for another buck")...
The "OSS" movement shouldn't define itself in terms of Microsoft, it should just worry about making the best software it can.
yup, don't try and fight the 800-lb Gorilla, ignore it. Eventually it will die trying to market against a free (both senses) product. That's not to say the inertia won't keep M$ around for a long time, but inertia is hardly momentum.
+&x
It's clear that if creators aren't paid, less stuff will be created. (I won't address the question of the quality of stuff produced by those who are paid vs. those who aren't.) But having creators get paid by using government force preventing the making of copies is ethically questionable, and with the advent of digital media is not practical. It's time to drop that model and adopt a new one.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
What is the difference between an amature passing around frat photos and a professional photographer? Usually some sort of quality control, standards and consistent conduct. The same thing should be true of code. You should be paying for the quality control testing, the guarenteed performance and functionality, and the reduction of risks as compared to say an amateur's effort.
No way. What BillG is arguing in this interview is that if you charge for software *directly*, and you don't enforce copyright on that material, then a user can obtain the services of a "professional photographer" at the rates of a "frat boy", simply by making use of the extremely available copy functions on home computers.
Now, if you charge for software *indirectly*, the way RedHat does, then this is a different issue and you would be correct. Of course, you cannot instantly and cheaply duplicate quality tech support the way you can a RedHat Linux CD.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
The first person who says "This is old news" gets a Clue Stick upside the head.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Yes, it is called "coercive monopoly power".
The cake is a pie
If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
What he's describing is Free Software! I can almost taste the irony! The very phenomenon that he dismissed as an absurdity is the very phenomenon that is going to bring down his software empire: people writing code for fun in their spare time, and giving it away for free.
At that time, programmers were a rare and exotic breed. There simply weren't enough programmers to go around. Now we're reaching critical mass. There are millions of coders out there. And not just mercenaries like Gates. There are now enough people who enjoy writing code as a hobby that free software is starting to take flight.
Imagine a garage tinkerer. He comes up with something vaguely useful. For example, a higher fidelity audio speaker. It would cost him millions to produce this thing and share it with the world. But when a coder comes up with something interesting, he need only send word to freshmeat.net, and the world gets this innovation, at almost no cost to anyone.
Gates didn't grasp this idea at the time because he simply couldn't imagine someone coming home from work, and then writing code just for kicks. At least he couldn't imagine that happening on the scale we're seeing today. But then again, this is the guy who said that 128Kb RAM should be enough for anyone.
I would have to very much agree with your statement. Bill had some details wrong in that quote, but much of the theory seems to have come true so far. It is true that some things just do not get developed quickly or perhaps even not of quality when it comes to the less glamorous applications, documentation or niches of OSS software.
Everyone likes saying "You see that? I did that!" and your friend or coworkers reply "Wow cool, that's great!" It's a pain in the ass when you say, "Check this out!" and you pull up a file explaining why what was done where in such and such an app, and they reply "Uh, so?" Sitting there I know it's gonna be very helpful to someone sometime, yet I kind of feel like I just blew a week of work.
Quoting another slashdoter I once read: "How many more mp3 players do we need, when there is real work to be done?" I'm not implying that people shouldn't be doing what they want. But as an animal OSS doesn't get some things done as of yet. Perhaps a TBN (thankless bunch of nobodies) org needs to be developed to take on those crappy tasks that just don't get done but need to be.
Thanks for the thoughtful commentary! Yes, I did come across somewhat arrogantly. That was the point in this specific case. Arrogance breeds arrogance. When somebody crosses the line in their advocacy of Windows to tell me I should buy it, I treat them a lot differently than I treat someone who says, "I use Windows because it does what I want."
I realize that Windows is a perfectly acceptable operating system for an enormous number of people. And, if you can imagine it, I don't think they are all stupid, gullible twits looking for someone to give their money to. No, a lot of them are just people looking to get a job done.
I hope you'll understand if I don't feel too upset that two Anonymous Cowards decided that I'm arrogant on the basis of a single article. Like most people, I have a range of ideas and opinions. Some of them are a bit harsher than others. I also have my good moments and my bad ones. Not everything I write can be a gem for every reader.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Considering he "invented" the idea of charging for software back in the homebrew computing club days, this makes perfect sense. It also shines alot of light in some dark places. This guy is one of society's role models. Whatever else
we may think of him, he's popular. People want to be Bill Gates.
For one simple reason: the money. I could care less exactly who he is I just would like not to really have to work again in my life and devote my time to what I enjoy. I could easily live on the sum of roughly 5 million or so (a drop in the bucket to Bill Gates) and never have any other worries or problems (except health).
I wonder if they're aware of the price they must pay to be Bill Gates. Maybe we should create a movie: "Being Bill Gates"... ought to be an interesting surreal world. We'd start with the UNIX Ewoks and just go from there. Bill
payed a steep price for his dollars.. I'm not sure it's the way I'd want to make my millions, if I made them at all. Just some food for thought...
I actually have thought about what I could do given a little invention called the time machine. Basically go into the past armed with something like the entire collection of technical knowledge and a set of dates cronicalling when said technology was developed. Then get a group of people together and have them do all the development first. Guess who invented the first PC? slashdot-terminal! Guess who created Unix? slashdot-terminal? Who invented this nifty Linux thing? slashdot-terminal! Who was president at least 5 times? slashdot-terminal! Who won every large scale bet on sports teams during this time? slashdot-terminal! Who is the janitor at the Slashdot-TerminalCorp's world headquarters compound? Bill Gates! That is if I let him live.
Even better get all the technology that will be developed in the future and then go into the present and release everything under the GPL before MS and Intel can do anything about it. Now *that* would encourage innovation.
MS manager: well what about that new OS you guys have been working on?
Programmer: Oh well we can't do Windows 5k those open source guys beat us to it.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
When the interviewer asked Mr. Gates about user's wishing that Microsoft and Radio Shack in this particular case could possibly make available some more, a lot of detail about the [Level II] ROM, Bill basically denied, deferred, and dodged the question:
G: Well, if there's a problem with Level II ROM, people can work with Radio Shack. They have their own support team.
B-K: I'm talking about the software specifically.
G: Why is that an area of such interest? Why don't they demand that the circuit diagrams for the Z-80 chip be included then? All that stuff be documented? I mean, they bought the box for one function, and the price was set to support them.
But the really telling part is this comment:
G: We put flexibility into the ROM which isn't documented at all, and which is not sold as a feature on the thing.
It's not a bug! It's a feature! We would be foolish to believe that a person like Bill Gates would add a feature and not charge for it. I doubt that much of anything was documented in those ROMs
I guess old habits do die hard.
The first time I used BASIC was in 1977. It came with my Commodore Pet 2001. For about 2 years ALL the software I had for it was open source. Compute Magazine for years published source code for programs in their mag. Not only that, they had versions for about every 8 bit machine out at the time. I wonder what Bill thought of Compute at the time. He must have like them, as he advertised in the mag. What I find increadible is how Bill is trying to tell another programmer why software should be paid for during a period when most software was free. Bill acts like he invented logicil expressions and flow-charting. I'm suprised he hasn't tried making them Micro$oft's IP by patenting them.
Hmm, let's take documentation as a typical "unglamorous" undertaking. Following your argument, the developers probably don't have that much interest in spending the time to write the documentation for that last obscure widget somewhere in there. But the beauty of OSS is that if that documentation is necessary, *somebody* will probably get the itch to add it in.
Sure, most users will probably have no idea how that undocumented widget/feature works, but eventually somebody will, and will contribute. Contrast this with a commercial environment, where because of upper-level pressure *some* documentation will be written, but not necessarily good documentation -- and in general, for somebody to contribute to the quality of documentation is rather hard, esp. if you're not allowed to check the source code. For an OSS project, even if the existing docs are poor, *somebody* who badly needs the docs will eventually get frustrated with the poor quality of the docs and figure it out from the source code. Then he will contribute higher-quality docs to the project. Also, some people just feel that by writing docs they're helping out the community, so this in itself could become a "glamor" factor that motivates people to contribute to the usually "less glamorous" tasks. Money isn't the only motivation for developing software, and this could also apply to writing docs. (Although it is true that in general, writing docs has much less "glamor" factor in it.)
Of course, this argument only works if there are enough users of the software out there that there will be someone who has the skills to contribute, and finds the need to contribute. It will certainly be interesting to see how this turns out.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
It gives people who slagged MS with little reason a chance to find out why MS gets slagged, and the attitudes that cause the company, and the former CEO, to be so maligned.
With information like this, it gives us weenies a chance to make up our own minds. The quotes are not edited, nor are they skewed. The way all factual reporting should be, but I forget! Honest factual reporting doesn't SELL, does it?
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
is 100% flamebait! Honestly! what did the /. people think when they posted it here? That there would be intelligent discussion about its meaning in today's society? No. If they did, they need to realize that the maturity level of the people involved with these discussions is approximately nil. Bill Gates = The Great Satan to these people, regardless of the context. (Actually, anything remotely associated with Microsoft...) Mention BG and you get nothing but utter crap. Criminy. Reading these comments makes me ashamed to run Linux.
>Why is this? As the majority of hobbysts must be aware, most >of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but soft- >ware is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked >on it get paid? Just a curious aside... The reason Bill Gates was asked to withdraw from Harvard is that he was using the university's PDP-8 to create the software for his own private for-profit business. So I guess hardware doesn't _always_ need to be paid for... :) Of course, he and Ballmer just donated millions for a spanking new computer science building at Harvard, so I guess all is forgiven.
I basically grew up hacking on the TRS-80, and all this brings back a few memories.
One thing that I see in this interview where I have to agree with BillG is about the patch points for the BASIC ROM. Having personally disassembled both the Z-80 and 6809 versions, and written many patches and extensions just for the fun of it back in my high school and college days, I agree that the kind of support that would be needed to document them is enormous.
Basically, anyone who is a good enough programmer to use those things is a good enough programmer to figure it out on his own. Besides, you need to understand how the whole ROM works and the coding style before you can use them anyhow. Use the Binary, Luke!
I don't understand why DBK was so hung up on this particular point. Well, I do see his point, but I also see that it would have been pretty near impossible to document this in a way that it would be usable.
But I will say this about the ROM. I could only find about 35 bytes worth of suboptimal code in the old Level II BASIC ROMs. This is in comparison with the ColecoVision BIOS ROM, of which I've found over 1K out of the 8K of code that can be optimized. BillG certainly knew how to program the 8080/Z-80 back in those days.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
One of my earliest recollections of how Microsoft felt about their intellectual property was my experience with the early Macintosh edition of Flight Simulator.
.. the "Finder" window, icons, desktop, and everything else you see on the disk at startup are all fake, and the illusion is even more clever when you consider that the disk really does have a mountable Finder volume on it with an application called "Flight Simulator" .. guess what it does! ;-)
.. not to harp on a point, but technocracies are easy to start and VERY HARD to tear down.
MSFS was only offered in one version for the Mac, a floppy-based port for the early 128K and 512K Classics with fairly primitive graphics. I had noticed right away that it didn't like to run as anything but the boot disk, and decided to find out why -- intellectual exercise only, nobody sue me please.
Believe it or not, virtually all the code lives in the "unallocated" space Finder can't see on the disk! MS hacked the boot code and made FS a custom OS all its own
My point, before I get knocked down to -1 for the tangential discussion, is that it took a hell of a lot of work to do all that just for a game. What that tells me is that MS is VERY ****ING SERIOUS about controlling as much as they can about their code even after it goes out the door, and Bill's comments in the interview above are perfectly consistent with that attitude. I guess I don't blame them too much; Win2K's source, if printed out, would stack taller than the Statue of Liberty (not my data -- see SciAm) and they have to protect their investment, but still
Just my $.02. YMMV.
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
It's a nice read. He states how angry he is that people are "stealing" his software. Remember that this was a time of people helping people learn and build their own home computers. Gates has been in it for the money from the very begining. He doesn't care about innovating anything, except ways to part you with your money!
That damn time machine set me back 15 years!
My favorite Microsoft innovation has to be the "Start" button. For years, I was confused by graphical interfaces: "What do I click?" "How do I start?"
Microsoft made it so clear -- click "Start"! What could be more obvious or user-friendly?
You want to shut down your computer? Click "Start"!
You want to launch that program that you use everyday? Click "Start", go to "Programs", go to "Bud's Software, Inc.", go to "BudEdit.exe"! What could be faster, easier, or more intuitive?
Until the "Start" button, I was intimidated and confused by computers. I was forced to take a low-paying job polishing lug nuts at the local tire store. Now, thanks to Microsoft, I have a certification and a medium-paying job administrating high-power enterprise servers. It's so easy -- if something goes wrong, I just click "Start", "Shut Down", "Restart the computer"! What could be better?
Several causes suggest themselves:
Nope - don't believe a word of that!
I'd judge this to be partly true; it could be argued that one of the few true Microsoft innovations is the outgrowth of shrinkwrapped software licensing as we know it today. (I'm not saying that it is an unalloyed benefit; merely that it is a result of their activities.)
We have to head on to...
The Official W. H. Gates III bio provides a little indication of this; How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates describes it in more detail as does E-Mail from Bill.
The point here is that it is manifestly clear that "Trey's" positions are informed by the fact that his father was a corporate lawyer, one of the founders of Preston Gates & Ellis, LLP.
Many high tech companies have tended to have a hate-hate relationship with lawyers; I don't think it is any coincidence that Microsoft has had huge legal successes in the past when involvement with law was to some degree pervasive in the young Gate's life.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Perhaps some of you have heard of a famous open letter Gates wrote in 1976 condemning piracy. It's available here
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Well, fundamentally people get paid for their their time (# hours spent coding), task (# bugs found) or talent (finishing the damn thing). The software is merely the codified expression of that time/task/talent. Fundamentally there is nothing wrong with charging, after all you are paying a photographer for the opportunity costs of him mollycoddling another client. The photo is merely the product that results as his service.
... though with SUVs sometimes you wonder if pointly-haired CEOs are being overpaid). So in essense, there is nothing wrong with being paid, however, for hundreds or even thousands of dollars, you expect something of appropriate value. Automated catalog/calendar services just don't cut it any more.
Now code (as bits and bytes) are by themselves neutral. What is the difference between an amature passing around frat photos and a professional photographer? Usually some sort of quality control, standards and consistent conduct. The same thing should be true of code. You should be paying for the quality control testing, the guarenteed performance and functionality, and the reduction of risks as compared to say an amateur's effort. However, as most people have commented on the UNITA end-user license, the software industry seems a little relunctant to withstand the same scrutiny and peer review that scientists, doctors and lawyers go through. So far the public has been happy enough to play along but when they discover that they are foking out hundreds of dollars for a piece of silverised silicon and not the service they've been expecting, then heads will roll. Afterall, you expect a car to take you from A to B without stopping at C (much less act as an ornamental ego-booster
In any industry, there's something calle the marginally utility in that once you've saturated a market, people refuse to buy the product as the perceived value is negative comared with the utility they expect to gain. That is one reason why pyramid scams ultimately come to a rather nasty end as they run out of gullible fools (their target market). Now you may ask, doex next month's red-hot Zithanium (or whatever) make any significant difference compared to last month's Zithantium-1? They (marketeers) would like people to think so but buying a computer/software is not the same as buying a razor blade. People expect (at those kind of prices) something like a durable good (though I wonder about the deliberate time to warrentee expiry on products nowadays). If companies want to make software a subscribable service, thne they should just bundlle it with an internet bundle with clear terms of service/performace and let the ISP purchase the distribution rights based on their knowledge of the real implementation costs instead of trying to flog it onto every back country redneck and his dog to the nth degree. (nothing wrong with rednecks so don't go pointing any guns).
It must be nice having rent-seeking profits sitting pretty while everyone is losing money pushing a saturated market.
LL
This is not a flame. But it seems that the same arrogant, almost cavalier attitude that has him (or, rather, Microsoft) in trouble these days has been a prevailing thing.
Perhaps if some advisors (or something along those lines) of his had "toned him down", MS would not be in the trouble is now. Ironically, it would probably be nowhere near as successful.
You usually have to fight nasty in business. Bill seems to take that from kicking in the shins to knife in the back-like levels.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
You speak as though the desire to advance technology is incompatible with the desire to make money. I think you would be hard pressed to defend that statement rigorously, whether in its general form, or applied to Bill Gates specifically.
Take me for example; I'm an astrophysicist. If it turns out that I can't make money doing astrophysics, I will do something else. Does that mean that I don't care about astrophysics, that I'm just in it for the money? Of course not. It does mean that I have to eat and pay my rent, and on top of that doing first-class work in itself requires resources. If I can't at least cover those costs, then I can't do astrophysics.
It seems probable to me that some of these things were going through Gates' mind when he wrote his "Open Letter to Hobbyists". It's also easy to understand why he might feel that something he had put a lot of work into was "his", and that he was entitled a royalty whenever someone copied it. After all, aren't authors of books entitled to the same privilege? There are some problems with software licensing terms, to be sure, but I don't think the root of those problems is that people like Bill Gates want to get paid for the software they produce. We may not agree with their position, but that position is not so unreasonable that we should not at least respect it.
-r
Being recognized as the creator of a work is not at all the same thing as being able to use government force to prevent others from making copies of that work.
If you claim to have written something that I have created, you are lying, which is recognized as unethical by almost everyone, and has been throughout history; and you are commiting fraud, which is recognized as illegal by almost everyone, and has been throughout history. If, however, you make a copy of my work, it's much less clear that what you've done is unethical, and its legal status varies though time and space.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Wow, who can forget the Tandy Color Computer III? That thing was nifty...or it was when I was ten years old and just learning programming. That thing had analog inputs, so you could even do video editing on it. MS Disk- BASIC v1.1 and the 512K of ram. That thing was fast too...of course having the OS/programming language in ROM and almost never having to do disk i/o helped. I won't deny I played a lot of games on that thing...but I wrote most of them :-)
I still remember the last issue of Rainbow mag. It had dwindled from a spacious glossy color magazine to a small newsprint production. What a sinking feeling I got...oh well. After that my CoCo went unused, and I spent all my time learning DOS, C++, and how to use a BBS. The world was bigger then.
My Opa still has programs on his Acer laptop that he copied from the CoCo. How? He spliced together a mutant serial cable and did a straight dump through the port using a terminal program! He had to do some fiddling on the CoCo copy program to keep it from dropping characters, but now the programs are all safely migrated to GW-BASIC (!!) He is amazing...he still writes database programs in GW-BASIC that take up three to five floppies, including data files! Somehow the 640k limitations of DOS are powerless to stop him.
The 80's were quite a decade. I can still remember that bright, flashing cursor against that ugly nuclear green background. Oh well, it's the nineties and the world has moved on...whoops I guess we're in the aughts or the naughties or the 00's or whatever.
JD
I don't think that business requires a take-no prisoners, unethical attitude. That said, the appearance of that can be very good for business.
Take Roy Cohn's law firm (the late Roy Cohn is infamous for being counsel to the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era, and later belonged to a litigation practise in NYC), where the appearance was that it was totally unethical, utterly without scruple, and would thus get the job done at any cost. It gained a substantial reputation along those lines. As such, it was intimidating to be faced by Cohn or any of his partners or associates. They were able to get settlements on the basis of reputation alone.
Microsoft has that same kind of reputation on Wall Street, a company that will be totally unethical and ruthless in business in order to make a buck. Wall Street being what it is, the corrollary is that if they will do anything to make a buck, they will always make that buck, and are therefore an excellent investment.
It has come out recently that MS has faced SEC investigations for using its cash reserves to smooth out fluctuations in corporate income. This is a serious violation in best practises. However, MS's stock has continued to rise because of their reputation - it's expected that a company that unethical will do that kind of thing, ha ha, but they keep on making money so we don't mind.
Of course, if MS started losing money, the stock would plummet and people would tut-tut that such practises just don't pay, but so long as they continue paying, brokers and institutional investors are more than happy to wink at them for it. Sometimes even praise them for it. I believe that it would take a major act on the part of either the SEC or DoJ to end MS's equity honeymoon.
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
From the posts that I've seen so far, it seems like many people are forgetting when this took place.
20 years is a long time as far as computer technology goes - that's patently obvious. But at the same time, it's also a long time for a sector of the economy which was just beginning to see the light of day (yes, they had computers, and computer programs before that yada yada yada - PC's are different though).
Thinking about it, would the OSS model have even taken shape if Bill Gates (and his ilk) had just given away their product? Very likely not.
OSS is a logical progression, and slamming BG just 'cus you like linux is shortsighted.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
Surely they have a right to feel like this. If they choose to develop software in a closed source type fashion, surely if we rip off this software this is wrong. Even if we feel that it was wrong of them to have written their software in that manner.
Gates does not seem to grasp the concept that WE HAVE A RIGHT, AND A NEED, TO FIGURE THINGS OUT ON OUR OWN.
He cannot grasp the concept (and the legal and ethical cleanliness) of REVERSE ENGINEERING, because he doesn't understand that someone would take the provided tool and want to use it for something else, or improve it, without going back to the original toolmaker and begging permission.
He cannot grasp the concept of DISCLOSURE, because that would not be useful to spoonfed consumers who wouldn't want to invent or extend new uses for a product. It doesn't mean we would flood Radio Shack with support calls -- those who know how to code have a need for this information.
He cannot grasp the concept of FLEXIBILITY, because that would not matter to people who have no creative ideas on how to use the tool.
Bill wants to provide us with a monolithic, closed box that only performs the functions he has decided to enable, and wants to make sure we come back to him to get more capability. And so today we have Code Generation Wizards, closed, undocumented APIs, the EULA, and Service Packs.
This paternalistic attitude can only be explained by feelings of superiority or lust for power, and probably both.
Thanks to Slashdot for this revealing article.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Right, now that that's over with, can we actually have an intelligent discussion of the issues without letting anti-MS and anti-BG biases show through?
No?
I see.
Well, I'll try anyway. I think he made some good points in this interview. Sure, he came across as somewhat agressive -- but you don't get to be a multi-billionare by being passive. The interviewer was a little on the agressive side too.
His points on copyrights are often forgotten nowadays... if I write a piece of software, that software belongs to me (assuming I didn't give the rights to it away to my employer or someone else). I can do whatever I want with it. *I* own it; *I* am responsible and in charge of its distribution. If I want it distributed freely, fine. If I want people to pay for it, fine. The point is that the choice is *mine* to make.
Bill Gates' points about copyright law and how they apply (or applied then) to software were quite good, if you can get past the "what an idiot he is," stage of thinking.
Powers&8^]
The fact is that code is like art or literature, you spend your time and energy to create something, and you would like it to be protected from some loozer coming along and claiming it as his.
This was not a fact at the time with respect to object code -- read the quote I included up front about the Datacase decision. Here's more in Judge Flaum's decision:
And here is what he decided:
This is precisely why Gates and 20 others were contacted for this article. It all seems so obvious 20 years later, doesn't it?
Dennis
How can you people get trolled by a FUNNY POST!?!?!? In my opinion, it's even a bit overdone, but no, you have to go and REBUKE the post!
I'll summarize my claim that it was a sarcastic post: You can't say this, believe it, and be able to spell, all at the same time. This is a collective flame. Those reacting violently to the aforementioned post are hereby sentenced to get a clue or join the Katz Club for People Who Don't Belong But Want to Participate All The Same And Also Change The Place A Bit Because It's Not What They Expected After All.
BillG sez...
G: Just like you go to a bank, and as a gesture of humanitarianism, you take their money and you give it away! That's a gesture of humanitarianism! In society, we don't need to pay... If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
Of course he's wrong about the banking metaphor. Money is unitary and only can increase through interest accruing loans (AFAIK). Software is like fire - it can be freely distributed without lessening the original flame.
He is right about the second comment, in a way, but in the context of freely distributed software, he doesn't understand what "expensive" really means. Not that I blame him for being unable to predict the future or understand a culture he had no hand in.
"Expensive", in terms of open source/bazaar software, is measured in units of *glamour* rather than units of *money*. Projects that are highly glamorous, like an OS, a compiler, or a web server, are built quickly and voluntarily. This is because the reward to a developer on an OSS project is the personal excitement and the renown that accrue to them through their work. But on the other hand, projects that almost anyone would consider tedious - like documentation of the third UI widget to the left three dialogs deep - is "expensive". It won't get done unless there is some other form of reward.
In OSS, that reward seems to be the incentive of converting newbies and defeating MS, but it's clearly not the overpowering drive that's enjoyed by, say, the KDE project.
I would be very interested to see how the future of the free software movement pans out with relation to these unglamorous undertakings. Will they eventually be assimilated into OSS, or will they remain in the purview of money-driven operations like MS?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
all the proof you need that software innovation and quality was NEVER Gates's watchword, being wholly dumped for the holy $. Not only does he come across as arrogant, but he seems to regard with distaste anything he's not making a profit out of. Jeez, Bill! In those days you NEEDED to share ideas just to build a computing community. His tone when he finds that a piece of code has been shared in hex is quite a nasty thing to hear. It would be deliciously ironic if one of his programmers today started with that little bunch of hex back at the turn of the '80s.
Sounds to me like he had his heart set on a monopoly from the very beginning.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
The fact is that code is like art or literature, you spend your time and energy to create something, and you would like it to be protected from some loozer coming along and claiming it as his.
Get off the "I hate Bill" and concentrate on what he is saying. He's saying that he's entitled to protect his work. If someone publishes his work without his permission, he should have legal rights to sue or otherwise get reparations (SP?).
This isn't something that was invented by Bill and Microsoft, it's an idea thats been around for years and years before.
Most interesting to me are Gates' opinions about supporting software and the costs associated with such. I'm kind of brought back to the original story post, which says:
[Gates] talks at length about how no one will ever write software if they can't make money at it.
First off, Gates is talking about commercial software, not the garage software or college project software that frequented this time. Secondly, in the context of the time of the interview, he's absolutely right. I mean, we can look at the Open Source world today and say, "Look, Redhat's making money and giving away their software! So is Debian! Blah blah blah!" but really, they're not making money off the software. They make their money off of support, selling the manuals and consulting with large businesses. Gates mentions the incredible burden that supporting software could be, especially more technical issues. He's absolutely right. The reason it works so well today is because the base-entry level for technical support is so far above what it was back then. Kids routinely know more about the systems they use when they join the workforce than even their bosses do, and entry level tech support is around minimum wage. These types of people were 'experts' before, and commanded reasonable sums of money, not to mention they were rare. Back then, a company who said, "Hey, we'll give away our software and code and charge for support," would've lost money because of a) the more expensive costs of developing software and b) the more expensive costs of support.
You may or may not agree with Bill Gates, but he has an excellent business sense and does a good job of recognizing what is happening in the computer world around him. It's this kind of business attitude that has made him very successful. In this interview, you see a little of that, and especially with issues like support and free code, he clearly understood where money could be made in the industry and where it couldn't. That's the mark of a very successful (future) businessman.
However, there are people in open source who point out all of the things they need or want that MS doesn't provide:
The usual answer from MS or its defenders is that Windows is as good or good enough or that the item isn't necessary. The point that usually goes unstated and shouldn't is really very simple: It's my machine. These are my computing tasks. I say these things are necessary. Attacking my opinions and my best judgement concerning how to fulfill my needs is a quick way to alienate me.
Alienating potential allies is a good way to turn them into opponents. That's no problem when they are your competitors. But when they were potential customers, it isn't good business. Open source OSs for the i386 architecture gave a lot of people like me the option of saying, "Fine, I'll be over here getting some work done." They gave the zealots a rallying point to try to take market share from MS. I'm not in the zealot camp, but every bit of FUD I read pushes me that way.
I am a cynic in some ways. I have eyes and a brain. When someone tells me something that contradicts my experience, I take a look. If I can't find a hole that makes it at least plausible that I am wrong and I find that their version would benefit them, I assume that I am being lied to. Note my choice of wording. When I am told something that in my experience can't possibly be true but would benefit them, I don't assume that the speaker is merely mistaken.
My reason is simple. I hold people to a standard of competence when they demand a change from me. People have a right to be mistaken without a presumption of malice. When they apply their own judgement to me, for their own benefit, I expect them to be right. I don't apply that standard to the neighbor who offers me a cookie with the words, "You'll love this new recipe." I do apply it to the painter who says he can paint my house less expensively than his competitor.
If somebody wants me to buy, use or recommend software, they have to convince me that it can do the job. There are some jobs that Windows can do. All but the most hardcore of zealots will agree to that. I'm not ready to recommend to my mother that she replace Windows with Linux on her machine. There are things that Windows can't do. There is no Windows equivalent to Beowolf that I known of. Windows won't run on a lot of hardware platforms that Linux has been ported to. The middle ground is heavily disputed.
Wanting to be better than the competition isn't enough. Wanting people to believe that you are better than the competition isn't enough. Being better and convincing customers of it is the bottom line. My mind is still open. Windows didn't freeze at 3.1. Linux has evolved since the 1.0 kernel. If MS wants me, I'm out here, but they have to have something to say.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
February 3, 1976
An open Letter to Hobbysts
--------------------------
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now
is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself.
Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a
hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the
hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby
market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC.
Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have
spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding fea-
tures to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC.
The values of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who
say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising
things are apparent, however. 1) Most of these "users" never bought
BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and
2) the amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbysts
make the time spent of Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbysts must be aware, most
of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but soft-
ware is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked
on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is
get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't
make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual,
the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing
you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can af-
ford to do proffesional work for nothing? What hobbist can put
3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his pro-
duct and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has
invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800
BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very lit-
tle incentive to make this software available to hobbists. Most
directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they mak-
ing money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported
to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbysts a
bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up
at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or
has a suggestion ot comment. Just write me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114,
Alburquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than
being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with
good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft