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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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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?
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"...
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 I was born 30 years earlier, far uglier, and a manipulative geek.
Two out of three ain't so bad...
No sig
This sounds like an invitation to start a viagra vs. emacsagra flame war.