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Through The Steve Ballmer Looking Glass
Class Act Dynamo writes "I was browsing for a video clip I saw the other day, and I came across this clip from 15 years ago of Steve Ballmer pitching windows 1.0 in a television commercial. All I can say is WOW. Apparently, there was a big demand for integrating "LOTUS 1-2-3 with Miami Vice." You'll understand when you see the clip." Let it not be said that Microsoft has no sense of humor.
There are at least a dozen of these videos floating around, some starring Bill & Steve together. They were made for the amusement of the employees and played at the yearly company meetings.
I saw this vid about ten years ago. Ballmer didn't make it for use on TV -- it was shown at an internal Microsoft sales-team meeting. You know -- pump 'em up. Monkeyboy could do well selling used cars, methinks. Just the sort of person who can take a mediocre systems-software company and turn them into a globe-trotting monopoly.
First, for the people too terrified to follow that link, it is safe for work and will not burn your retinas like the original goatse. Second, those pictures aren't actually for Teen Beat, as claimed, but were promotional, in some weird alternate reality where that kind of thing could help promote your product.
These images are actually publicity photos taken of the then 30-year-old Bill Gates coincident with the initial release of Microsoft Windows in 1985. The Corbis photo archive identifies their depiction thusly: "Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, reclines on his desk in his office soon after the release of Windows 1.0. 1985 Bellevue, Washington, USA."
I just tried calling it and it came back saying it is not a working number. :(
Well Mitch Kapor founded Lotus. The individual (I forget his name) who did the coding (someone else entirely, Kapor was the business man) did it all in a very short period of time pretty much by himself. He was writing 1-2-3 in assembly language. Yes a concept that is hard to believe for many Slashdotters with all their talk of PHP, PERL, Python et al, but back then, writing desktop applications in assembly language was quite common and in fact a *NECESSITY*. Why? Because other programs were written in this manner manipulating the IBM PC's hardware directly. "Device drivers? MS-DOS APIs? What's that and why bother?" was often the viewpoint held during those times. Programs were significantly more zippy when the IBM PC's hardware was manipulated with hand written assembly. So much so that it was a business necessity... if you wanted to compete in the IBM PC software space. Otherwise your competitors had a major advantage over you - SPEED of the application.
This is all hard to appreciate today given how powerful computers have become. Virtual machines? Not on your life, e.g., the UCSD P-Code system never caught on (the notion of virtual machines was pioneered at the U of California, San Diego):
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/
Why didn't it catch on? Simple, speed. The IBM PC had a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor and hand written/tuned assembly code creamed practically any program written in a high level language. In fact for years "PC Magazine" (which is still very much alive) would publish the assembly language listings to many of the MS-DOS utilities featured in its covers. Needless to say the idea of that magazine publishing assembly language listings today is quite laughable.
-M
I've spent several hours perusing their collection of funny/shocking videos. Once you start, you find it hard to stop. Also a few of their celebrity prank calls are hilarious. Be sure to use Firefox, though. It's a rather shady site, and you're guaranteed to at least get millions of popups in IE, if not several spyware installations. If you use Firefox, you won't have problems.
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