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The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates
theodp writes "BusinessWeek discusses They Made America, a new book which claims Bill Gates got the rewards due Gary Kildall. The book attacks the reputations of key early PC era players - Gates, IBM, and QDOS programmer Tim Paterson - asserting that Paterson copied parts of Kildall's CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall, allowing Gates to prevail and depriving Kildall of untold riches and credit for a seminal role in the PC revolution. Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th anniversary of its CS program."
After reading the title, I thought this was going to be about Steve Jobs!
Monstar L
This has actually been discussed at length in other books, most notably Michael Swaine's excellent Fire In The Valley.
Bill Gates was a negociator, not a programmer, that's why the other could in no way have become him.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Would we have hated him as well?
So what? Life is not fair and never has been. I'm sure history is rife with examples of people 'not getting their due'.
Waaaa...waaaa...waaaaaahhhh. Cry me a river!
I still have my boxed copies of CP/M-86, DR-C and DR-Fortran at home. Having used CP/M on an Apple ][+ with a Z80 card it was a pretty easy transition. To this day I still use Joe as my editor. It's a virtual clone of WordStar that I used on the CP/M machine 20 years ago.
Too bad DOS and MS won out, CP/M was the cat's meow at the time.
Trolling is a art,
Gates deserved his accolades for being a shrewd businessman, not for his programming skills. Kildall doesn't deserve them for precisely that reason, because he isn't a good businessman, couldn't promote himself or his products, etc.
It's no good being a great programmer or having a great product generally if you can't communicate that or convince anyone of it.
from TFA: For all his technical brilliance, he was a poor businessman. I think that's the real point. It certainly wasn't technical superiority that got Microsoft where it is today. It was marketing superiority.
You mean this guy could have been responsible for the least secure OS on the planet? That's a legacy best left to others I think.
I'm sure we've all had experiences of people telling us how clever Bill Gates is inventing Windows, or the Internet or whatever.
The real shame is that certain computer museums in the USA perpetuate the myth that the manufacturers of software like Bill Gates were actually the inventors of it. I also think that Steve Jobs is a cool guy but doesn't deserve much space in the history of computing. Commercialising and inventing are completely different things.
I can't say I'm surprised to hear that Bill Gates wasn't the innovative programmer he's made out to be, but then we already knew that. His strengths have always been elsewhere, mainly in the form of making some pretty good business decisions. Because of that, this Kildall really couldn't have been Bill Gates - he obviously lacks the business sense.
I do find the assertion that it was all a conspiracy with IBM laughable, though. First, why would IBM care? Second, if IBM had a clue about the future value of DOS back then, they would have bought it outright rather than choosing to license it.
The guy sold his company to Novell for $120 million. Cry me a river...
I was watching an old episode of Triumph of the Nerds yesterday, and they mentioned how Gary Kildall didn't seize the opportunity.
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Kildall wrote a seminal paper called "A Unified Approach to Global Program Optimization" which introduced dataflow analysis as a general technique for program analysis and compiler optimization. Every time you add -O([1-6])* to your gcc command line, you're applying techniques that Kildall invented.
:-)
CP/M was pretty cool, too
...but I coulda been a contendah!!!
He didn't let no little upstart spoil his skiing trip...
I'd not cut short a holiday to be near that Microsoftillian stench either.
"Kildall seemed to represent the best hopes of the nascent computer industry. But by the time he died at age 52, after falling in a tavern"
"Kildall's then-wife, Dorothy McEwen, the company's business manager, refused to sign their nondisclosure agreement. She is now ill with brain cancer and can't remember the events, according to daughter Kristin Kildall."
Do we see a trend here?
Mark
All too often I've seen people (in this industry) assume false rights (like intellectual "property") and then when someone else does an end run arround them then they get mad because they were sidelined.
Well, I'm sorry to see them hurt, but what did they expect?
Gary was either really naive or a complete ass that everyone wanted to screw over...
The1Genius - Littera Scripta Manet
the story i was told by my compsci professor, who was a graduate student when gates was an undergraduate, was that he was expelled.
Not a day go by without me missing the pip application. And people call Linux complicated! HA!
"persistence". Okay. That very CP/M that IBM and Microsoft stole from him was the basis for DR-DOS (via CP/M-86), which Microsoft proceeded to sandbag via various anticompetitive means, ultimately resulting in a very hefty payoff for Caldera, plus significant contribution to the antitrust case against Microsoft.
He was persistent. He did work hard. He had a slime ball working against him for whom laws are optional.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This assumes that Bill Gates is rich because he's a programming genius. That's not at all true. He's rich because he is a ruthless businessman, a shrewd negotiator, and takes no prisoners.
As Peter van der Linden wrote, "Don't worry about Gary; he'd rather be flying," or something to that effect.
There are more important things than being the richest man in the world.
He was a verray parfit gentil knight.
Im parapraising "Trimuph of the Nerds" here so I'm probably missing something here, but basicially this is what it said.
IBM First went to MS asking for BASIC and if they could buy the OS that was built into Microsoft Softcards for the Apple II for the IBM PC. MS directed them to Digital Research saying that they didn't have the right to sell IBM the OS.
IBM goes to Digital Research, and basicially gets the cold shoulder.
IBM Goes back to MS asking for an alternative to CP\M.
Bill gates finds QDOS, buyes it for $50,000 dollars and sells the rights to it to IBM.
More infomation can be found on wikipedia Here
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Kildall would not have become as wealthy as Gates because he simply was not as ruthless. Even after Gates got DOS going he continued to build MicroSoft through shrewd, backstabbing, and sometimes illegal ways. Kildall didn't seem like he had it in him to be that way.
This is ontopic. AOL does more to perpetuate stupidity than anyother company. ITs comercians now ask for suggustions on how AOL can "improve the internet". As if they are in charge of the entire network. They also promise to provide users with a "Better Internet". Thats just wrong. They mean "a Better Internet Experience",but they leave out the last word in an attempt to confuse people. It worked in the mid 90's when people would come over to my house and ask if I had AOL. I'd tell them that I had a different connection to the Internet, and they'd be really confused. They really thought that AOL owned the internet. It took a lot of convincing to get people off because they so closely identified the two. Only once buisness started hooking up work computers to the internet did people start to understand. My parents still don't.
Getting back to the parent, yes many companies deliberatly blur the line between their product and the industry in an attempt to become synonomous with it. AOL,Yahoo,Google, and Mircrosoft all do it. Just try explaing a guy on the street about the difference between windows and gnu/linux/kde. No one knows what an operating system is. They think windows is built into the case or something.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
MS got the deal with IBM. But MP/M the multiuser version of CP/M was reversed engineered and became the "secret" filesystem of early Novell. That was why Novell brought DR to avoid a lawsuit, it wasn't just to get DR-DOS. So Kildall lost out there too.
There's no doubt that Kildall was one of the pioneers of the industry. He invented the first operating system for microcomputers in the early 1970s,
Writing a PC operating system (or a language interpreter for that matter) is developing software, not much new there to invent.
Even if you're product is technically best by some measure there are other products that may be technically better by some other measure. Hindsight often tells you which benchmark was right and which was wrong but in the heat of battle it's hard to see the forest for the trees.
And all that said, oftentimes the selected product is simply vaporware (as was MS-DOS until Gates bought QDOS) when there are real running products out there. Part of it is salesmanship on one side and lack of salesmanship on the other side, but usually there's some favors being traded under the table.
And while Kildall wasn't the biggest fish in that pond, he had hooks into a number of software packages (CP/M was being sold on millions of PC's, the DR languages and tools too).
I've heard the story about how IBM was left standed, but I've also heard that's just an urban legend and they did come to some agreement, went into some talks, and didn't come to an agreement on other matters. The NDA was just something that caught on to the storytellers, but wasn't totally true.
So I recall hearing somewhere...
Many Slashdotters probably know that the reason IBM worked with Gates and no one else is because Gates's family was rich and well connected. Gates's mother was probably the one that got him in good with IBM. Gates's mother served on the board of the United Way with IBM's Chairman John Opel. What a coincidence!
This is just another example of how the elites at the top of the hieracrchy operate as some sort of parasitic sub-society, perched above us, exploiting the rest of us, feeding off of us.
You may think that my perspective is warped, paranoid, whatever. But I think it serves as a reality check and a balance to the omnipresent messages of confomuity that society and the media flood us with every day.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
my 8" floppy disk died and I had an error message "BDOS ERR ON A: BAD SECTOR". Then I mistyped the PIP command and I had the error message "BDOS ERR ON A: BAD SECTOR"...
It wasn't just Gates/MicroSoft. Any number of players could have gone on to form a monopoly in the PC OS market, and we'd still be suffering consequences.
So is computer software industry naturally monopoly friendly?
May the Maths Be with you!
How is it that sometimes one of my posts gets slowly moderated upwards to 4 or 5, and then suddenly receives a load of negative mods, apparently simultaneously? Is it that there are Slashdotters with multiple accounts, or do they gang up? Or is it the editors?
Perhaps the astroturfing companies also mod down posts that are negative to one of their clients, and use multiple accounts to do it? Perhaps that's why there are these sudden negative mods?
I don't consider my post to be flamebait. It is an honest opinion.
Sounds like Gates and IBM Kildall his hopes and dreams ...
Kildall was too engrossed with making immediate profit to, even if he had got in the door first, have prospered for long.
If I was born 30 years earlier, far uglier, and a manipulative geek.
Still, Evans' book falls short of clarifying exactly how Kildall lost out to Gates. He relies primarily on Kildall's memoir, his family, and his friends.
They must have struggled to find the most biased source there was.
You mean, they very cleverly hid the defects in their products and touted the crap out of any possible benefit one would gain...
So they encouraged you to see value that wasn't necessarily there...
isn't that a form of fraud?
I know it's not, but it ought to be. Of course, ads would be a lot less interesting if they had to be truthful the whole time (i.e. showing consequences of drinking vodka instead of just how some people feel for the first 15 minutes after drinking a shot)
stuff |
And here's a case where software patents would quite possibly have corrected a huge wrong. Just imagine if Kildall had been able to patent the various technologies in CP/M. Where would MS be today?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Kildall is requesting $699 per cpu of the operating system he invented. :)
It has brief bios of many of my heroes [Edison was a nerd, right?] with interesting insights into how they wrestled their ideas into realities, who they fought, what they did differently from contemporaries.
In my 30 years of programming, many of them at startups, I know of nothing to compare to the myriad drained lives, burnt hopes and stolen thunder that bob and sink in the wake of Mr. Gates. Larry Ellison may be a runner up to Gates in this grim category but that is usually how those two fare in their competition. For every millionaire Gates made, there was a company out there that had a good idea and smart people who still couldn't grow in the shade of Microsoft. To name names would rub salt in the wounds of some good friends...lets just say having a great idea and a willingness to work hard are not enough to insure success. The lucky ones were assimilated.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Because it sure reads like one of Yoda's to me.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
this man
Wasn't the GEM graphic environment also a Kildall project? I remember using it for desktop publishing way back in the (pre Windoze) day. Pretty slow on a 8086, but it ran well enough to work for my purposes then.....
Pirates of silicon valley: History of Apple and Microsoft.
Torrent:
http://tinyurl.com/3m3ly
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
So many misinformed
I worked at Digital Research for three summers (1982-84). The story about Kildall going flying was often told, but many people said it wasn't true. I don't think we'll ever know, because basically there aren't any impartial witnesses.
Find free books.
1) Release an O/S ripped off from a competitor, with no copy protection at a low price.
2) Everyone adopts your O/S because it is cheap to buy, or can be copied for free easily.
3) See off all competition, make the API so huge & unweildly that no one can clone it. Patent bits of it to make sure.
4) Stamp down on copying, introduce draconian licensing scheme that ties every copy you sell to one PC, undermining normal rights of purchasers to resell or move O/S to other PCs.
5) Jack up prices.
6)...
7) PROFIT!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
IF you want to see Gary Kildall on TV goto www.archive.org and download some 80's era episodes of "Computer Chronicles" where he was often guest host - lots of other interesting guests too, like Bill Joy, Elizabeth Rather, etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It's true and it's also true that IBM did business with him because the CEO of IBM at the time knew Bill Gates' mom. "...you're Mary's son? Ok sure here's the goose that lays golden eggs..." So it helps to know people, definitely helps and it is what makes the world go 'round.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
I wish my last name was Gates so I could say "Hi, I'm Bill Gates." Oh, and I wish my first name was Bill.
--Jack
Kildall
Killed all
wtf?
no wonder he didn't make it. all that bad PR!
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Everyone on /. seems to assume that coding is the alpha and the omega and nothing else matters. That if you code some clever algorithm, screw the interface, screw users and screw marketting. Only the high magic hacking matters, right.
You see that attitude reflected in 100,000 piss-poor open source projects that noone wants to use. They've got all these cool optimizations and clever hacks, and should have been the next greatest thing. Except they aren't, because noone gives a damn about them.
What makes a program or a company successful is what you do _after_ you have the cool algorithm or hack. Like user interface. Or like usability.
The same goes for CP/M. It was barely a program loader with the most minimalistic command-line interface. Even internally it was a primitive monolythic piece of code that basically it didn't even have DOS's (or Unix's) separation between directory entry and allocation table. It would have required a complete redesign just to support bigger floppies.
DOS or CP/M were but a starting point, _not_ a killer app that turned MS into a monopoly over night. Sure, the cash infusion from DOS helped a lot to get them started. But if MS had stayed happily making just DOS, they'd still be a small company noone gives a damn. In fact, less than that, since other OSs were more advanced and Moore's Law would soon make a PC good enough to use those instead of DOS.
The story of MS is far more complex than that of DOS alone. And their monopoly isn't just the OS, it's a whole lot of interlocking pieces which make the OS a must.
It includes for starters making some damn good and _affordable_ apps for it too. When you ask someone why don't they switch to Linux, what's the ISO standard answer you'll get? "Does it run Word, Excel and IE?" They jumped on any app idea that looked like their users might need badly.
It also includes caring about the developpers. Yes, laugh all you want at Uncle Fester's "developpers developpers developpers" monkey dance. But _that_ is what kept Windows having a steady stream of apps, while for other OSs you'd have a hard time just getting any dev tools at all.
Basically while all the idiots thought "noooo, you can't take my precioussss compiler! I want to be the only one who sells apps for my OS!" and left you begging for months even for a compiler, MS almost gave away everything you could possibly want to make an app.
It also includes being smart enough to realize the importance of users and of a good UI. You know why the relationship between IBM and Microsoft went sour? Because the idiots at IBM thought a GUI was a waste of money. That MS should concentrate on just making an API for geeks, and stop wasting money on stuff like a GUI.
Etc, etc, etc.
Saying that just replacing DOS with CP/M would have made another company become Microsoft, is short sighted and idiotic.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Microsoft .NET Framework and SDK are free.
The Microsoft C# compiler is free.
The Microsoft VB.NET compiler is free.
The Microsoft C compiler is free.
The Microsoft C++ compiler is free.
A Microsoft WebForm IDE is free (WebMatrix)
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
While it is important for software to gain pervasiveness to be relevant and to make a difference, its possible that with out someone pushing, become prolific based just on its own merits. Its certainly open to debate, but it is true that it is possible for software to become prolific without someone pushing commercialization, while commercialization on its own cannot happen without the software in the first place. By that fact I would argue that the creation is the more important portion of the creation/commercialization combination.
It's wasn't the cat's meow, it was the bee's knees! Get it right yo!
86-DOS, the sucessor to QDOS, was available from Seattle Computer and also used by used at least one other company, Lomas Data Products, before the IBM PC was announced (see the Lomas Data products ad in the June 1981 issue of BYTE).
The BizWeek article was wrong in saying that MS improved 86-DOS for use with the PC. PC-DOS 1.0 was basically 86-DOS 1.14. The big modifications was to make it look more like CP/M UI.
One of the biggest markets for CP/M was the Apple Z-80 board made by M$ and designed by Seattle Computer. The 86-DOS deal was the second time that SCP got screwed over by MS.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
"Evans bases his Kildall chapter on a 226-page, never-published memoir written by Kildall just before his death in 1994. ... But by the time he died at age 52, after falling in a tavern, he had become embittered and struggled with alcohol."
So, the entire chapter is based on the writings of an embittered drunk after he had become an embittered drunk.
"Screw you all, I would have been Shaq if it hadn't have been for that deliberate foul that caused my knee injury!" doesn't make the washed up drunk any more of a pro basketball player. It doesn't even mean the foul was deliberate. It means an embittered person who didn't have any of the rest of the personality aspects that led to the other person's success, never put in the work, never fought as hard to get back up from setbacks, and, likely, wasn't even fouled half as deliberately as they've come to convince themselves has simply convinced themselves that their life could have been better if it wasn't for something unfair someone else did to them.
Basing an article on their embittered rantings, because it makes for a sensational enough article to sell some copies of your book and get some headlines, isn't exactly what I'd call great journalism.
As someone who himself has fought a lifelong battle with depression, I relate well to his story.
Sad as it is, if it hadn't been this it would likely have been something else. We are, in many ways, doomed to our fates. He simply lived the life he had to live, and nothing more.
I would call 'Fire in the Valley" informative and thorough but definitely not excellent. The rough grammar made it a rather difficult read for me.
bet the guy is sooooooo glad he wasn't Bill Gates now
The reason why Gates is where he is today is because he was ruthless and at the right place at the right time. Kildall was neither. It made little difference what Gates shipped, as long as it managed to generate a prompt and wasn't too good (a goal he met with distinction).
Today's standard of copyright infringement would have been sufficient, I think. Kildall's attorney says pretty much just that.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Wicker man reference - cool
It'd be interesting if whomever owns that IP now would file suit. Copyrights last a long long time. I wonder what the damages would be....
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The thought of being Bill Gates give me the shivers.
No thanks.
He can keep his $.
He was pushed!!! By some guy that looked suspiciously like Bill Gates.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
I said that the elite operate as a parasitic subsociety exploiting those below by helping each other. And you in turn rebutted me by saying that "Connections and networking are important".
:-)
All you did was "assume your conclusion." Circular logic!
Abstractly, I said A is bad. A being interactions of the elites to help each other, the major component of which is of course "Connections and networking."
You rebutted by saying A is good because some component of A is important (connections and networking). You assumed the thing that you wished to prove!
That is a Logical Fallacy (circular logic). If you want to do something worthwhile, you might want to learn some logic and rhetorical techniques first. How are you ever gonna see the man behind the curtain without those all important tools?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Because he had no business sense at all. Key evidence? When CP/M was a success and the staff in the victorian house in Pacific Grove were supporting it and should have been trying to enhance & extend it, what did Kildall do?
He closeted himself in his office for more than a year to write a PL/I compiler! Granted, putting PL/I on an 8080 was a technical triumph and was probably immensely satisfying to Kildall himself, but the market demand for it was indistinguishable from zero. And all that time, Kildall was basically unavailable, an abdicated leader, during the most critical time of his company's life.
Killdall was certainly brilliant and a visionary -- I still remember a presentation of his at which he demonstrated the potential of controlling a videodisc player from a computer, in the process demoing all the functions that, 20 years later, appeared in DVD players -- but he had no interest in business success, and he lost interest in his own creation, CP/M, yet wouldn't trust anyone else to take it over.
The argument is kinda silly -- If you'd take the time to read about kildall at all you'd realize how bad he did get screwed. (Not that he didn't do his fair share of screwing himself...)
-- How Kildall got fucked --
1) When the IBM PC was released both CP/M and DOS were avaliable. DOS for $40, and CP/M for $240 (If this was a joke, Gary wasn't laughing.)
-- How Kildall fucked himself --
1) He was late for a meeting w/ IBM because he was out flying.
2) He refused to make CP/M more user friendly. It was an incredible work of engineering, but a bitch to use. i.e., to copy a disk from a: to b: in CP/M
> PIP B: A:
In Dos
> COPY A: B:
So yeah, Kildall got fucked by both IBM and himself. Definantly.
But the drunk argument just doesn't wash... That's absurd.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Another thing, consider that someone with a name like 'killed all' was in Gates position .. might make for some hateful jokes.. .
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
For all you kids who weren't there at the time, do some reading and you will find out that there wasn't any exclusive deal with Microsoft. When the IBM PC came out you had a choice. PC-DOS or CPM-86. both were available to order. It wasn't excluded. Back then me and most of my friends wanted to get CPM-86 but it as 3 times the price of PC-DOS, $300 to $100, back when $100 was serious money to a hobbyist. PC-DOS won strictly on price.
And why the whining that Gates wasn't a programmer (which he was). Neither was Jobs or McNealy or many other company founders. Running a successful company is a different skillset.
for imposing the \ as a directory separator, the / as an option separator and CR LF as a line separator.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
> Bill Gates' rise to fame and power is because of his skill as a businessman...
Wrong.
Bill Gates rose to power because he is a criminal, and nothing was done when he broke the law.
Gates had the good fortune to be working in an industry that involved a totally new technology, i.e. software. This meant that the government had no idea what to do about Microsoft's various acts of sabotage, fraud, etc. In a smarter world, the courts would have realized that you don't need new laws, rather, the same laws apply to software as apply to other property, and in other industries.
Bill Gates won because the leaders of the other companies in the software industry were basically-honest, good businessmen, whereas Gates was a criminal.
When the law is not enforced, a criminal will beat a businessman every time.
Let's look at some of Microsoft's history.
Microsoft was losing to DR-DOS at the start of the nineties, until Microsoft added a false message about the incompatability of DR-DOS (Gates knew it was false from Microsoft's own testing).
That's fraud -- a criminal act. The courts ignored it.
Also at that time, Geoworks was five years ahead of Microsoft in providing a modern, working GUI for DOS. DR-DOS and Geoworks were being pre-installed on a large percentage of PCs. But Microsoft made a change to DOS specifically to cause Geoworks to fail.
That's sabotage -- a criminal act. The courts ignored it.
WordPerfect had already beaten Microsoft in the Word Processing market. But Microsoft side-tracked Wordperfect when they promised the world that OS/2 was the new direction, then undermined WordPerfect on Windows by providing intentionally-broken API calls.
That's fraud and sabotage, ignored by the courts.
Netscape had already beaten Microsoft in the browser market, until Microsoft started doing things like paying companies to break their contracts with Netscape.
There were various criminal acts there, which were generally ignored by the courts (other than a partial invocation of the nearly-useless anti-trust laws).
And in Java, Sun provided a cross-platform language that was perfect for web-based applications, such as e-commerce. Microsoft had nothing similar to offer, and it has taken Microsoft ten years to catch up.
Once again, Microsoft stopped Java with sabotage and fraud. And this time, Microsoft's criminal acts were perfectly documented in Microsoft's own internal papers:
Sabotage:
"Strategic Objective . . . Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."
Fraud:
"At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."
Some people point to Microsoft as an example of Capitalism at work, but it's not true. When criminals are allowed to get away with their crimes, it actually undermines Capitalism.
To repeat my initial point. Bill Gates is NOT a "skilled businessman" -- he is a criminal, whose various acts of sabotage, fraud, and so on, should have landed him in jail.
Offtopic yes, but this is one of the best photos I took of Tim rallying here in Washington State. From June of 2004:
Tim Paterson
..the good ol' people who invented the english language. Just think we use their words every single day and they get no credit! Heck, technically anything written or verbally spoken is all there's because they came up with the language!!!! where the credit for them?!
All ridiculousness aside, this is how society always operates. Columbus is credited for discovering America yet there were people in this land before he even came. Wright brothers flew the first airplane but DaVinchi had plans of a vehicle that could have flown.
Most ideas are built upon the ideas of someone else. After all, you can't have a os without the circuitry to put it on. Nore could you have neither without the discoveries of the assembly line/electricity.......Now who gets recognized or not, that's for the masses to decide.....
here, i was going to post a few comments defending billy boy... only to find that the endless stream here has already flooded that one over.
the first thing i thought of were all those ridiculous ADTI comments about linus not inventing linux. (insert goose and gander quote here)
it ridiculous to look at the #2 guy and say he could have been #1 except for *this* or *that*... like that guy who discovered relativity right after einstein... whatshisname?
whatever else he might be, gates is definitely a one-of-a-kind... a geek and businessman. microsoft is worth admiring for their business acumen, if not thier software, and that's entirely due to bill. i doubt if there's more than one or two others in the world who could have done what he did with the hand he was dealt.
It's easy to forget that Gates was a real programmer before he started focusing just on the business. Beware of letting envy at his success (and that is the real source of 99.9% of the negative comments about him, admit it) mask those origins.
I started with computers around 1978-9 with the Radio Shack TRS-80. I began with BASIC but progressed to Z-80 assembly language. At one point I disassembled and studied the 12K Level II BASIC ROM, written in Z-80. 12 kilobytes of Z80 assembly is not a lot of space for a reasonably sophisticated (circa 1979) language interpreter so some clever hacks were employed. One that still sticks with me was the error code section. The routine that looked up the 2 letter error code used the contents of the 8 bit E register. But if you looked at the section preceding that routine, there were mostly a series of 3 byte instructions, a 16 bit LD BC,nnnn (BC being the 16 bit concatenation of the 8 bit B and C registers), one after the other. This was very puzzling at first but then I noticed that the jumps to print the error code were *within* those instructions. It turned out that the operand, nnnn, was itself an instruction: LD E,err ! Dropping down after that were LD BC instructions that did not alter the contents of E, which eliminated the need to have many jump instructions and hence conserving the precious 12K resource.
From my understanding it is likely that Gates worked on that code, given that it originated as a Microsoft product and that he was still coding at that time. If so, it is obvious that he was not just a great businessman but a superlative "hacker" as well.
Fucking Christ on a Crutch, my wife and I make about twice that of the average American household, and we still can't really afford it. It's like buying an appliance! We waiting 2 months to buy a new dishwasher when our broke.
Look at the price of XP Pro(or even the horrible-in-a-networked enviornment Home Ed.) or Word, non-upgrade. Hell, even the upgrade prices are ridiculous. Most people simply cannot afford it. So most people "steal" it, except when they get it with a new machine.
Saying that just replacing DOS with CP/M would have made another company become Microsoft, is short sighted and idiotic.
Defending MS after knowing how they got started, and acting as if noone else could have filled their shoes, is short sighted and idiotic.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
...who wrote TRON, currently used on more Japanese embedded devices than all the Windows boxen in the world, or something like that. He "coulda been another Gates", except that he is a professor rather than a businessman [if I remember rightly]. He was discussed here on Slashdot, though I can't find it.
Like Linus or this Kildall guy, the TRON guy has an adequate day job, and geek personality instincts: He wants the thing to work right, rather than wanting only to make it milk the world of cashflow for himself.
There is the business world, and then there is the technical world. The business world often functions as a millstone around the neck of technological progress, rather than the godsend they claim to be. But don't worry, it's mutual...
Jack Handy posts to Slashdot!
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
It really wasn't a matter of not allowing software patents at the time, or that today's copyright infringement would have prevented it. Neither matter because it was a different time. Programming and computers in general were just beyond what the general public and the legal system could understand then. You have to let a new industry grow and see what it can become before you start placing too many restrictions on it. While I lament the misfortunes of Kildall (and many many others) and most certainly don't care much for Gates and his business practices, I think that strict IP laws including software patents would have killed the industry before it really reached critical mass.
Vote Quimby.
Yes, isn't it interesting how the do nothing/ know nothing well-connected kids manage to grow up with laps that the good jobs can fall into. The rest of us still have to do mindless work for our money, if we are lucky enough to even get jobs.
When you call it whining, you pretty much tag yourself as one of the lucky ones, who has never had to deal with the down side of that luck thing.
He sold his company for 10 times more money than i will ever earn in my whole live even if my carrer goes as planned, he could have had a great live complete with his private helicopter, boat, villa, ect.
The fact that this still wasnt enough for him (i.e. breaking down over his "tragic" live and becoming a drunk) earns him a position as loser, not as a hero
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
When I was in high school, my father bought an "APCOM" computer, which was an unlicensed Taiwanese copy of the Apple ][. It had a Z-80 board it in, and we used to run WordStar under CPM.
Wow, those were the days.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
That is the story that I was told around the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. When I was there I heard from numerous sources (including the man who claimed to have caught him and had him expelled) that Gates was kicked out of Harvard for stealing computer time.
This was back in the era when computer time was expensive and accounted for. I was told that Gates had broken into an account to which he was not supposed to have access (a Harvard account billable to the NSA on a machine at an air force base), and ran up a very large bill. The figure was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
The story went that he was unrepentant even after being presented with the evidence, went before a disciplinary board and was kicked out of the university.
Kildall wrote PL/1 (PL/M) for the 8080 /first/. CP/M was written in PL/M (as were most of the tools).
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
When a large corporation comes to you hoping for you to provide them with an operating system for what is to be one of the largest computer launches of all time you do not treat them like shit.
From what I have heard of the situation the IBM people bent over backwards when approaching Kildall.
Even if Kildall did end up providing them with the operating system is it highly unlikely he would have had the smarts to include a non-exclusivity clause to sell his OS to other companies.
If Kildall did end up making the operating system IBM would have gotten the lions share of the profits instead. This is due to the fact that it would have been signifigantly more difficult for the clone computers to be made.
Really love him or hate him the openness of the PC architecture can really be traced back to the moment when Gates signed his deal with IBM.
I noticed that Cryofan stirred up the hornets nest with his comments; looked at the replies, ignored the replies that deal with facts and seeks out a message that appears to be flamebait, and then tears it down?
I'm starting to think that he replies anonymously to his own messages to set up strawmen for him to tear down. Sounds like a very Chomksyist approach to me.
XP Pro Upgrade with SP2 ranks #41 in software sales on Amazon.com. $160 after rebate. Microsoft Windows XP Professional Upgrade with Service Pack 2
Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003 ranks #6 in software sales on Amazon.com. Three seat. $113 after rebate. Microsoft Office Standard Student and Teacher Edition 2003
GET'em, TIGER.
If only there could be a retroactive suit to go back and put a cap in ms' corrupt corporate ass.
This kind of information, if made required reading, could put one HELL of a dent in ms' filthy image.
Would it be safe, legally, to put this knowledge into a GNU/GPL file and deliver it onto websites or onto Linux disks and other media? I know it's not good to deliver scathing commentary or facts about a ruthless, cutthroat, vile, filthy, uncouth, deserving-to-be-strangled-asshole-company, but sometimes...
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The real fraud here came when Gates presented himself to a computer naive world as a genuine computer programmer and visionary!
In this role "Chairman Bill" was and is as phony as a three dollar bill!
Having a lawyer as a father has helped too.
As a logical consequence of all this fraud and mis-representation, Internet Explorer, ActiveX and all the other Microsoft crap follow logically and naturally!!!
Bill gates finds QDOS, buyes it for $50,000 dollars and sells the rights to it to IBM.
:)
IBM buys the rights but doesn't agree to pay a lump sum so they offer a percentage from the sales
A good book I recommend reading is "Accidental Empires"
Subterfuge
a grams
Trickery-dickery
It's too bad Apples own lawyers MISSED that. It's a height of folly for a lawyer to miss injected specfics that are an attempt to "minefield" a contract into oblivion.
Gotta be careful with those "version #" and "any version" clauses.
It's this kind of tricky-dick stuff that mires musicians and novelists, especially the publishing houses that CLAIM to be PROTECTING themselves when they demand the author submits to the publisher's ownership/control:
--all drafts,
--sketches
--blueprints
--models
--di
--plans
--audio/visual recordings
--notes
and other nouns. They are not just doing due diligene to ward off complaints or suits, you know. They are trying to hem up the author who two years into a 3-year contract starts negotiations with another publishers. If said author surrenders ALL that material, other than the manuscript itself, said author most likely is SCREWED, and even unable to present that non-selling, non-performing material to a new suitor.
Capitalism and business law at its best.
That is why, as an aspiring author and as an artist NONE of my drawings or works leave my ownership. Anybody wanting to play the game with ME is only getting a non-exclusive license for a limited period of time in which to ATTEMPT to make a buck. By no means do they acquire and blocking or obstructing rights to hem me in. If I can create drawings, then they can go make their own if they want control over drawings.
Authors, whether of software, books, drawings, or what-nots MUST become non-conformists and use everthing at their dispose, from copyright, to copyleft, to creative commons, to GPL/LGPL/ and more. SOME RIGHTS reserved is better that ALL RIGHTS surrendered.
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Microsoft was losing to DR-DOS at the start of the nineties, until Microsoft added a false message about the incompatability of DR-DOS (Gates knew it was false from Microsoft's own testing).
This message never appeared in versions sold to consumers. Is the rest of your information as accurate?
Also at that time, Geoworks was five years ahead of Microsoft in providing a modern, working GUI for DOS. DR-DOS and Geoworks were being pre-installed on a large percentage of PCs. But Microsoft made a change to DOS specifically to cause Geoworks to fail.
Apparently, because I can't find a single reference to this by Googling.
They are totally different people with a different set of morals and attitudes..
I dont believe Gary could be the same sort of ruthless business man that Bill has been.
Having the product is only 1/3 of a business, the rest is how you manage 'the business'....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now to make the humiliation complete, "the Elites" are foisting religion down our throats to make us feel guilty.
Isn't is funny that I never see any indication of guilt on the part of any of "the Elite"? I can only conclude that they really don't believe!
Every time I see the words "faith-based", I feel like puking!
The long and short of it was that Gates licensed IBM an OS for not very much money because Kildall refused to license CP/M for so little. The end deal was not all that good for MS as Mr. Gates himself has admitted.
Microsoft's big break came when a court decision was made that allowed the fledgling clone-maker Compaq to reverse-engineer IBMs BIOS.
The subsequent flood of other companies entering the market allowed Microsoft to license DOS to others besides IBM.
The establishment of DOS as a cash cow through the flow of clone PCs gave Microsoft the capital to continue and add a score of very useful applications on top of DOS and eventually copy Windows from the work done by Apple and Xerox.
To say that Kildall was "ripped off" or had his ideas stolen is silly, the whole basis of Microsoft's success is that one court decision.
There was a documentary on PBS a while back that explained the history quite well. You can watch it on DVD now, it had some really grate interviews with Jobs and Gates as well as many others. The title was "Triumph of the Nerds".
If the court decision had gone the other way (which it might today!) we would have more expensive PCs, probably composed of IBM PCs and Apples. Minicomputers would probably still walk the earth, and the overall technology level of computing would be far below what it is today...although game consoles may have had more of a role in driving technology for 3D graphics for gaming than PCs would have.
-end of line
To reiterate, I am saying that the elite operate as a parasitic sub-society by trading influence. I say that the rest of us are being exploited that way. I really do not care whether the elite got there by dint of birth, or talent, or pure accident.
I am saying that what is happening is bad. Once people are elevated into the elite, they use that position to further strengthen their power. This is old animal way, of the evolutionary animal societies. I say let's move beyond animal society. Reject hierarhical power.
You in turn take one of the mechanisms through which this elite parasitic subsociety operates (networking) and you elevate to some special status. Who gives a f*ck? Why should this elite parasitic subsociety be accepted simply because you say "Networking is a good thing". You wave that phrase like some magic wand. YOu use the rhetorical ploy of saying that something inevitable. Nonsense!
Again, you have used circular logic. You assume your conclusion.
No offense meant, of course. I am not attacking you personally. Really, I mean that.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I was an employee at a small software company, and DR decided to get in the same market.
They came to company management and told them they were getting into the market, and wanted to buy our company in a stock trade, and if we refused, they would crush us with their mighty marketing dollars.
Management caved, but they found one sticking point -- the company owed me royalties on copies sold. DR balked and told me they wouldn't be paying me royalties. I got a lawyer, who told them that they would.
DR flew out their new VP of marketing who explained to me how much better it would be for me to take a flat sum up front and become a DR employee. In order to impress me, he told me he had just come from a sports supplies company, He reeled off all the sports figures he knew; I told him that gave him no insight into the computer industry.
Then Gary Kildall flew out and I shook his hand, but told him I thought the company I worked for would be better without him. He said he'd write his own version of the software and I wished him luck.
They ended their bid, and Gary wrote the software himself, for the IBM PC. It was a factor of 10 slower than the Apple II version we'd been selling, and then DR went under not too long afterwards.
The small company merged with one of its competitors (in the same market) about 10 years later, and is still around, still selling product, and sold the software I wrote for them for them in those years until OS X came out.
"Also at that time, Geoworks was five years ahead of Microsoft in providing a modern, working GUI for DOS. DR-DOS and Geoworks were being pre-installed on a large percentage of PCs. But Microsoft made a change to DOS specifically to cause Geoworks to fail."
Geoworks was well ahead of Windows, but Geoworks and DR-DOS were pre-installed on a large number of PCs? Maybe at a couple of swap meets, but not in the real world. . .The only somewhat mainstream implementation of Geoworks that momentarily bobbed into the mainstream was as an early GUI for America Online. Other than that it was forgotten as quickly as it was introduced.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
For anyone interested, archive.org has quite a large collection of older episodes of "Computer Chronicals." These episodes can be downloaded in MPEG2 format, are ~1gb each and look VERY NICE! I've added 10 or so to my computer history video collection, and enocourage others to check them out. There are a good number of episodes that cover neat things, I was showing someone the episode where they were demo'ing Apple's A/UX just last night. Next, Silicon Graphics, Sun, HP, Unix versus DOS, Amiga and Atari... It's also fun to see the predictions, "will Unix unseat MS-DOS?"
I believe there is an episode that looks back at Gary Kildall's history in computers as well - but I must admit I haven't seen this one yet.
Check it out! Don't forget Cringley's Triumph of the Nerds series (cheap on eBay, $50 on vhs from ambrose, $100 on dvd from ambrose last time I checked).
TNT movie was released on VHS only, but is out on the p2p intarweb networks as a DivX.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
No doubt moderators do mod up trash that merely seems informative. (Slackers!)
A nice side effect is that it draws attention to it and those who know the real story can put us right.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
When your post gets +modded it becomes more visible and more people moderate it.
Slack moderators don't concentrate on modding up more than down. Slack moderators also don't browse at -1, but +2, so by the time your posting becomes visible the good moderators start to leave off and the bad ones knock it back down again.
And of course, in a crowd the size of the slashdot crowd there is room for any number of moderator conspiracies to co-exist, no doubt there is more than one of the type you mentioned.
its the same sort of behaviour that swings online polls widely as the two extreme opposing camps canvas their friends and set up vote spoofers whenthey start to loose.
The answer is to meta-moderate.
It doesn't neccessarily mean that the bad moderators lose mod points in future but it does help make sure that the sort of moderators slashdot has are the sort of moderators it's readers appreciate.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
IBM wanted Kildall to sign a NDA
Kildall said f* off (actually, his lawyers did)
IBM went to Microsoft (for other purposes)
Billy G convinced IBM they had an OS
MS bought qDOS
???
Profit!
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Free for now.
What about later, if new features are added to the standards? Can developers count on continued free access to the improved versions with bug fixes and new features?
Secondly, AFAIK, you need to purchase a Microsoft Windows operating system in order to run those free applications. Even if it's lumped into the cost of the computer, that part is still not free.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Exhibit A: me.
I wrote it. I use it. It works.
The part I use is free to all. Enjoy!
An interesting video about Gary Kildall's life is at the Internet Archive for Computer Chronicles - he was a co-host of the show.
e .php?collection=computerchronicles&cat=Episode%20y ear:%201995
http://www.archive.org/movies/movieslisting-brows
I researched this thoroughly using primary source material, and that's just not what happened!
it's the only thing about XP I do like.
I wish we had something like that in linux - like an ASCII art animation that bounced around the terminal while find was running. Cute, useless junk like that tells joe user "this is so good we had time to work on this useless crap rather than fixing code."
Hmm... maybe I need to put together a shell script...
A lot of your issues are pretty much after the fact and reflect the behaviour of MS once they had established a dominant position they were trying to maintain and afraid they'ld lose.
The PC-Clone became available in the '80s. At that time I ran a CP/M Kaypro 2. Hardware for CP/M system was brutally expensive and that cost was what initially lead to buying a PC. When I bought my first PC clone, I had to decide what OS to get because at that time IBM and Compaq came with a preinstalled OS, but no clone did. Lots of new users simply pirated the OS from from either IBM or MS sources.
I knew CP/M and had become familiar enough with DOS to think that ZCPR enhanced CP/M was the best choice. However, software was fiendishly expensive back then and cost was a major decision factor. The choices for OS were MS-DOS, PC-DOS, and CP/M 86. MS and PC DOS both ran all the same software and I could usually borrow copies until I could afford a legal one of my own. CP/M 86 ran next to nothing and what was available put a new meaning to expensive. Software for CP/M also had to be carefully checked for compatibility since CP/M had a LOT of flavors and not all versions would run all software. "Backward compatibility" wasn't even considered. The decision was ultimately driven by economics. Just as now MS is really starting to feel pressure from a more economic choice in Linux.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
> Bill Gates' rise to fame and power is because of his skill as a businessman...
Wrong.
Bill Gates rose to power because he is a criminal
SAME DIFFERENCE. (For non native English speakers I'm saying "For all practical purposes, 'businessman' equals 'criminal'.")
I have absolutely NOTHING against ordinary people doing whatever they have to in order to survive! How on EARTH could one think otherwise?
But perhaps the rich and the powerful should have to operate under special constraints? Just an idea!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Although msft was the big fish by the time windows 2.x was shipping, they were certainly not the only fish in the sea....
I think the biggest event that made it what it is today not the deal won against DrDos, but the time that msft ported the OS/2 win32 api to win3.x. Originally, IBM wanted windows to be the "home" operating system and OS/2 for professionals, but when it came out with win32s releases that ran under win3.x, life was pretty much over for all the competitors as it made a very compelling product (win.3.11) and bought them plenty of time to make winNT into a reasonably competitive OS (much to the dismay of IBM and their OS/2 warp team).
Before the development of win32s on win3.x, it's easy to envision some market segmentation which would have allowed for other OS players to find a niche and grow, but with the windows franchise spanning the market from top to bottom, it didn't leave any of the potential competitors and breathing room.
By 1980 [Microsoft]...was certainly not an unknown quantity to IBM.
It's obvious that IBM didn't do their homework.
They didn't know squat about OSes or they would have gone straight to Tim Paterson.
gewg_
The history is clear, IBM offered it to killdall, he wasn't willing to sign contracts signing his soul to IBM, microsoft pounced on an oprotunity. "tricked" please. Not to mention I don't think Kildall had what it took to wrecklessly fight his way to the top of the market.
I used to work in MS Developer support. They used to take care of the developers and work hand in hand with them. Really it was only after the invention of VC++ where it was kind of put that writing windows apps in C++ was easy and we got a whole bunch of nobend VB programmers constantly ringing up for support (classic question: 'is there a function for getting the current directory? Yes, its called GetCurrentDirectory') that the developer support started to get restricted too.
I remember coming across this message, I think it was specifically the 3.11 update of Windows 3.1 which presented this message. In fact I think there wasn't much else in that update. Geoworks references seem a little confused, because I think it was lawsuits from Apple which killed PC/GEOS, which was not preinstalled on very many (any?) computers. (although I beleive the first versions of AOL innstalled a minimal version of GEOS to provide a graphical interface)
Apple sued GEOS and the court case crippled Geoworks early release. It was much later that GEOS was updated and renamed Geowork. I beleive they concentrated on the education market and did make bad decisions, but that was after Apple (not MS) had cut the legs from under their product.
Windows 3.1 would not run on DR-DOS 5 unless you had a patch from Novell to fool it or some such things. I've got the disks at home (DR-DOS, the patch disks), this is NOT a lie.
DR-DOS 5 kicked MS-DOS 5 butt.
(on the other hand, by the time winders-95 had come out, I'd already been using a certain other 32 bit OS which is popular on slashdot, so MS can nosedive into the ground for about all I care...)
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
But just because you can't Google for it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
I'm living proof. I find whack ass errors in Linux all the time that I can't find with any amount of Googling. heh.
The world would have been an even more different place had IBM inserted a "no reverse engineering" clause in the EULA for the PC BIOS. This may have given the computer industry a chance to come up with something better than the PeeCee - which was full of examples of how not to design a computer. It was the availability of cheap clones that allowed Windoze to take over - if Windoze only ran on high-priced PC's, then the Mac and Unix workstations would have had a chance.
What must be keeping Gates lying awake at nights is that the Samba and OpenOffice.org projects may end up doing to him what he did to Kildall.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
education editions and upgrades, and still at twice what other companies sell education and upgrades of the same class product for. And if anyone points out that MSWindows has tons of junk in it, I'll agree. They ought to be paying people to take it off their hands.
billy should get what he deserves, til he burps shit.
I met Gary Kildall once, and was lucky enough to get a handshake from him, and a Hello.
It was not that he was a bad businessman. It was that he was never about money. He truly believed in sharing his ideas with the people. He was the true populist. He thought that the purpose of his inventions were to aid in the advancement of humanity. I mean that literally, not as rhetoric; some people are actually altruistic by nature.
It is an indictment of us all, that we equate money and power with success. We claim to rise above that, yet the comments here demonstrate the hypocracy of that thought.
We have never had such a hero on our side. Apparently, we do not deserve one.
Who knows, Gates may become just a footnote in history in 10 years. We can only hope.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Oh ya and somemore bulls*** that may come up in the future. Windows is in more than 95% of desktop pc's coz Gates went around the world brandishing an AK 47 and threatening the world to buy his product. Graf had something to do with the stabbing of Seles. Schumacher had something to do with Senna's fatal crash. And some things that wont come in the near future. A pill for jealousy and a pill for the mental wreck. Surely this is someone's attempt to divert attention from facts emerging that Linux was made largely with codes stolen from Unix. Please note that my above comment is not disrespectful to Gary Kildall.In fact it is not at all about Kildall and is also not a reply to the previous posts.It is about people who reach assumptions without any basis, publish it and hope to get some quick money and public attention out of it.
Open Source : The lair of liars and losers.
Linux Today?
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.