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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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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."
This has actually been discussed at length in other books, most notably Michael Swaine's excellent Fire In The Valley.
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
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!
Paul Allen, who knew Bill Gates mother from their work on charity boards, asked "What about Mary Gates boy? I hear he works with these things."
Right quote (almost), right context, wrong attribution. It was actually the chairman of IBM John Opel who said that when he heard that Don Estridge was working with Microsoft. He and Mary Gates had bumped into each other at the United Way board. The quote is "that wouldn't be Mary Gates's boy Bill would it?" (Big Blues, Paul Carroll, pp 33-34)
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
You're right. Gates himself attributes his early success to one thing, contracts! He understood contracts, what they meant, how to do them, and so on. The Microsoft vs Apple case regarding the "look and feel" of the Macintosh interface imitated in windows is an example of that; Apple signed an agreement with Microsoft that effectively banned it from imitating the Mac, and Gates was apparently careful to specify a certain version of windows in the text of the document, so that when Microsoft followed it up with a later version of windows, and Apple sued, their lawsuit collapsed in court as a result of that previous agreement they had.