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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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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.
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,
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.
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!
I worked at IBM research. Basically if you develop something on IBMs time with IBMs resources they own it. A lot of companies are like that.
Some people like it because if IBM likes the idea they'll throw IBM resourses at it and let you develop it and pay you to do it.
They give you a lot of resourses to get your idea off the ground and will reward you if its a successful product. If its credit your looking for do it yourself.
They even tell the interns, if you have an idea and you want to develop it DON"t tell it to us.
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"...
> 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.