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Building A Computer From Scratch?
wackybrit asks: "The economy has given many of us the chance to go and work on some side projects. I was reading "Interview With Bill Gates" and have been inspired to create my own computer from parts, to write my own interpreter, and to really see if I could do what Gates and Allen did back then. With the Internet as a reference guide, it should be easy. However, things are not always so easy. I might be a techie, but I have no idea how memory chips hook up, how a data bus really works, and how to tie everything up. Do you Slashdot folk have any handy tips or resources I can refer to for building my own machine from scratch?" If you had a chance to build your own computer, would you make yours similar to existing designs (ala the PC, or the Mac), or would you do it differently?
I'm all for Microsoft bashing, but this is assinine.
BG and PA came from privileged backgrounds, but so have plenty of people who didn't manage to build multibillion empires.
Sure, their family's wealth may have given them an extra cushion (as well as a chance to play with some swell DEC's in high school), but their achievements were on their own in ways that money didn't buy.
In business, Bill Gates may be an asshole, but he also has a legitimate claim as a pioneer in personal computing. The Gates and Allen did write the first programming language for the first personal computer.
And Linux Torvalds wrote linux when he had barely a pot to piss in, while living with his mother and sister.
Money didn't buy any of these people's success.
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