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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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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
Would we have hated him as well?
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.
...but I coulda been a contendah!!!
It was Al Gore who invented the Internet, as we all know.
However, George W. Bush, obviously not content with just beating Gore on the political scence, went a step further and invented the Internets.
Obviously, it is our politicians that deserve most of the credit for America's greatest technological innovations.
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"...
Sounds like Gates and IBM Kildall his hopes and dreams ...
If I was born 30 years earlier, far uglier, and a manipulative geek.
Kildall is requesting $699 per cpu of the operating system he invented. :)
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!"
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
This sounds like an invitation to start a viagra vs. emacsagra flame war.
I heard a rumor that Bill Gates wrote Windows Me in a single weekend while hopped up on speedballs.
Yeah, poor guy. He had ethics.
Are you suggesting that is impossible to be both ethical, and a successful businessperson? What about co-ops? Google? Saturn?
Are you suggesting that the leaders of Saturn had ethics? They turned their entire planet into gas just to avoid zoning laws! If you want to talk about a planet with ethics, how about the people of Mars - at least they didn't take the water with them when they hightailed it out of there.