Slashdot Mirror
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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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."
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.
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!
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.
Moderate this comment
Negative: Offtopic Flamebait Troll Redundant
Positive: Insightful Interesting Informative Funny
Nothing to see here
Yes, in the case of software, commercializing, while just as important, is harder.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
You certainly have no clue as to Steve Jobs involvement in Apple's technologies and products.
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?
the story i was told by my compsci professor, who was a graduate student when gates was an undergraduate, was that he was expelled.
"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.
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).
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
...but those with the huge persistence and blind arrogance required to forge a new business area are rare and valuable. And of what use are these people without the ideas themselves? Without the ideas no amount of arrogace or persistence will allow you to achieve great hieghts.
Kildall was too engrossed with making immediate profit to, even if he had got in the door first, have prospered for long.
It was a fumble and mismatch of corporate cultures that Bill Gates was quick to take advantage of.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
"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.
It's not a matter of admiration. It's simply a matter of telling the truth and only giving people credit for their own accomplishments.
Ford did not invent the assembly line.
Edison did not invent the lightbulb.
Gates did not invent the internet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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)
Free as in Beer. Find a bug in VB.NET compiler? Good luck fixing it....
PS: Ever wonder about the Intellectual Property of Beer producers? Their secret recipes and whatnot? Would they be offended by "Free as in beer"? Funny though, that.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
> 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.
Is there any accessible source to the statement that Tim Patterson had access to the CP/M source?
As opposed to implementing the CP/M API from the official programmer's reference.
Executive Pope (small) Kallisti Engineering
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!
"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.
I think you are missing the point. I never said that the Elite Parasitic Sub-society (EPSS) is inevitable. I said that it is. Full Stop.
But there are also sub-elite parasitic sub-societies, faith-based parasitic sub-societies, scum-of-the-earth parasitic sub-societies, and internet parasitic sub-societies.
Society works this way. Nobody will invite you to join their band if they don't know that you play the bassoon. How will they find out? Either they'll see you playing on a street corner, see your flyer at the record store ("non-elite non-parasitic bassoon player seeks hammered dulcimer and timable players for new-age ska fusion band", or your mom might mention it in passing, to her hairdresser, who's daughter is the top hammered dulimaniac in town, and since your mom is a good tipper, the hairdresser gives your number to her daughter. All of these scenarios involve some person interacting with some other person. Scenario 1 is you interacting directly with somebody else, face-to-face. Scenario 2 is a time shifted version of scenario 1, and scenario three has somebody with whom you've directly interacted, interacting with somebody else, face to-face.
The human interaction is unavoidable (and inevitable) Its how society works, at all levels.
You really do need to come to grips with this, otherwise, you might end up writing a Manifesto about elite parasitic sub-societies. Then it's not a huge leap to membership in The Friends of the Hooded Sweatshirt Society.
Play golf, go bowling, join a church choir, locate a scrapbooking consultant, learn tai chi or kendo.
Your key to getting ahead is gaining the personal trust of people who can help you get ahead when they need the skills you've got. You could meet a girl. her dad might be rich an powerful, and be in need of a son-in-law to take over the firms operations so he and the missus can travel asia like they always wanted to.
Besides, it isn't the elite parasitic sub-socities you need to worry about, its the Elite parasitic sub-societies: The Bavarian Illuminati, the CIA, and Evil Geniuses for a Better fnord Tomorrow.
My Heart Is A Flower