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Return of the '70s Microsoft Weirdos
theodp writes "On the eve of the company's move from Albuquerque to Seattle in 1978, a famous photo was taken (in a shopping mall no less) of the original Microsoft team, looking mighty sharp in their '70s outfits. Almost 30 years later, as Bill Gates prepares to depart from Microsoft, the group (looking older, but better) reconvened for a retake."
"Bob Greenberg (center of old photo, in red sweater), then a programmer and now a tech and financial consultant ... "
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
For the photo that I need for when time travel is invented, so windows can be prevented from happening.
which guy had a sex change?
When I counted the people in each photo I thought 'wow! what are the chances of 11 people alive in 1978 still being alive now?'. Having read the article I find that there were actually 12 people supposed to be at the shoot but one was absent, and one had passed away in the intervening 30 years so it's actually 11/12 people are still alive 30 years later, but still, not a bad effort!
through the early years of microsoft gonna be in the picture too ?
Read radical news here
There are 11 persons in both pictures, and since it's supposed to be a retake of the same people 30 years later, it completely baffled me as to why the first photo had 2 women, while the second one had 3.
I mean, like, "WTF? did someone have a sex change?"
Then I read the article and went, "OOH."
Serving time in Aristotelean prison for violating laws of physics
The BBC has some footage of the new photo being take on the iplayer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b00c6sdc.shtml?src=ip_mp
Its part of a documentary about bill gates for the money programme. Bit dumbed down for non geek audiences but interesting none the less if only to laugh at all the 70's gates footage and Ballmers big shiney head. Oh and I cant find where but at some point bill gates jumps over a chair... there has to be some jokes in there!
hmmm.
The 70s photo is of of a bright eyed bushy tailed group ready to take on the world. It tells a story, smacks of potential and is a slice of history.
The current photo is a happy snap without a story. It begs the question "Why?" It adds an ending to the 1970s photo that would have best been left unwritten, allowing each viewer of the 1970's photo to make their own judgement of history. The photo is like a cliched ending to a stereotypical Hollywood morality tale.
That's odd.. my very own IT department looks much more like that 70's photo than the current one..
This picture got me thinking.
For all the things people dislike about Microsoft, even the stuff people sees as evil one should still acknowledge the contribution made by Bill Gates and Microsoft to the world as it is today. I am by no means a fan of Microsoft, yet had it not been for the visions of Bill Gates I sincerely doubt that computers would have gained the same traction in society as they have today.
I often seem to forget this when shouting my mouth off about how bad Microsofts software is or how evil Microsoft is. I will try to remember this the next time I get into a "how I hate Microsoft" frenzy.
Dude, please send the second terminator. I am still typing this on Windows, so apparently, the mission failed.
Go back and RTFA.
Chip H.
etc.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Yes... it is an old and basic skill but often useful.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
| Present for the reunion was office manager Miriam Lubow (centre of
| new picture), who missed the original sitting due to a snowstorm.
| Absent for the reshoot was Bob Wallace (top center), who died in 2002;
| after leaving Microsoft in 1983
If you'd RTFA, you'd know that one of the guys in the first photo died, and one of women in the second photo had been supposed to be in the first photo but hadn't been able to attend the shoot.
They were also gonna go back and recapture that famous 1983 photo of Gates laying across the desk all sultry-like, but he broke a hip trying to strike his pose...
http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html
Every Slashdot post that is an obvious M$ fanboy rant includes, "I am by no means a fan of Microsoft"
This is getting to be a clue, like "Think of the children".
Google this code phrase and see, http://tinyurl.com/4wxy6y
M$ fanboy code.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
goddamn n00bs.
It looks like media, especially the ones known to be very close to MSFT started re-polishing BillG. This happens after someone took his job joked with companies prestige with 40+ billion dollars in hand.
Lets watch... Especially check CNET News.com lately, you will figure what I mean.
Skimming the article, I noticed that a lot of the original cast quitted. Now, what could possibly make a "first day" employee quit at the biggest software company in the world? Usually, such people tend to be up in the lofty top floor offices with paychecks large enough to use as a convenient blanket at night.
How the hell do working conditions have to be to quit that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Compare this from TFA to this on Flickr, same times.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12693492@N04/1339024810/ --> Woz and Sjobs
http://ndn.newsweek.com/media/36/microsoft-bill-gates-technology-company-BZ04-wide-horizontal.jpg --> MS
"Windows, for all it's warts, allowed almost everyone access to the world of computers."
Plus free strings attached to it! viz.
Your 'access to the world of computers' must be acknowledged as a service that you license from a vendor, rather than a skill that you acquire and use for your own purposes.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
but back in those days they were who we are now. I am quite certain that at the time they were coming out with various versions of DOS and when Windows landed that they felt the same. They were up against the big hardware guys fighting for respect that they didn't have. It took them a long time to get there and in the process. In the long run they grew out of the need to go in a new direction as we are doing again. It is a never ending process and we should be glad for it. I am sure somewhere down the road, say twenty years or so, there will be people posting on boards dismissing Linux or OS X as being special just as some write off Windows.
Take it in the context of its time. Yes there were other platforms I would have liked to see succeed but they didn't have the drive needed. Just like today there are some ideas out there I would think should be better positioned but they lack the support of the community. Just as many here have grabbed onto Linux there are still those who prefer another way and they pursue it. Are they wrong? I am certain that back then Amiga and Atari people didn't think they were but they failed to form a large enough presence and community at the time to stay. With the internet it should be much easier for good systems to come along and get their day in the sun but at the same time it is also like a choir where you try to pick out that one voice but can't.
I grew up in those days and remember thinking how cool it was. I played with desqtop (sp?) and other windowing platforms. Yet I also remember how we were still pulling away from IBM PC brands at that time too, I remember stores filled with PS/2s and if anything Windows and various versions of DOS got us out of the control of platform vendors. It certainly helped to bring costs down to where most people could participate and perhaps that alone leads to where we are today?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
...that for the better part of 2 decades you cannot walk into a retail store to get a Window-less PC
...that MS choked the life out of Netscape, even when IE was free on every desktop
...that their embrace and extend diluted the OLPC's goals (to me this makes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation a mere cover not unlike crocodile tears)
...that a generation of users think CTL-ALT-DEL can reset everything from PCs to other appliances
...that yes, some of the more promising startup technologies that reflected true innovation were bought up by MS only to be downgraded to research papers and never to see the light of day
...that the OS has provided a fertile breeding ground for botnets, spyware, and viruses. Ask your sysadmin if you need help remembering this.
You might push the myth that they were responsible for putting a computer in a lot of households. Was there any other choice? They didn't need to strong arm or blackmail the dealers to sell HW with windows on it, if the product can stand on its merits. They killed Netscape because they feared it would have made the OS irrelevant. If you asked me, Where do you want to go today, we should have been there already.
Lower left corner.
I do doubt.
I really do. Okay, it accelerated the whole thing, but Gates is far from a genious. Most of his successes comes on the business front. He was there at the right time and did the right thing to grow his company. Thanks to the competition that was either too creative or conservative. Anyway, I don't think of Gates as a visionary guy in the sense of great achiever. What did he do? What did Microsoft invented that was truely novel, that nobody ever thought of? Nothing comes to mind: not the PC, not the OS, not the GUI, not the networking capability, not the office suite, not the development tools, not the language, not the media player, not interactive media language. You name it. Microsoft only bought, copied, stole, or adapt something already there.
He is a good business man in respect to capitalism pratices and monopoly and that is it.OK, I have only a vague recollection of this one, so I hope there's somebody else out there who remembers it too. Didn't find a link for it, unfortunately.
It was a magazine ad. I think there were three people in the photo - at least one was a woman - and they were sitting and drinking in the hot tub, only visible from the shoulders up. I think they were company employees, but could have been hired models. Might have been from as far back as the pre-DOS days.
I do remember a hot-looking woman in the photo. But that was a _long_ time ago.
The three most important words in a relationship are "I love you." The two most important are "Humor me."
Where on the high street can someone walk in and buy a Linux desktop. What's preventing the OEMs doing that. A retorical question that we all know the answer to .. :)
Linux is being used in consumer items, it's just that it isn't visible. The PC industry is effectily a Microsoft run monopoly. The hardware manufacturers would be better expanding into the embedded market. That's if Sir William will even let them .. :)
davecb5620@gmail.com
So I don't understand why you say that 8088 based machines were far cheaper than 6800 series machines. Based on what I remember about prices back then, the CPU didn't seem to be the biggest factor.
Bill Gates vision? You mean his business model? Nothing visionary or new there. He was selling an operating system product that was included with each PC so OF COURSE he wanted "a computer on every desk". So would you if you were selling a product with zero marginal cost. He just was lucky enough to get on the right horse with one of the two most important products on the PC (along with Intel's CPUs). It wasn't an especially good product even by the standards of the day. If it wasn't him it would have been someone else - have no doubt of that. Microsoft wasn't even in the operating system business relatively late in the game but it turned out to be a cash cow that put them where they are today.
Vision? No I'm not convinced Bill Gates' "vision" helped accelerate adoption of PCs. You can make a reasonable (though hypothetical) argument that his company's crappy technology and operating system monopoly held adoption of computers by the masses back by several years. Don't get me wrong, there are many things he deserves credit for - both good and bad - but his vision isn't among them.
"If you learn of an Apple-Google-Nintendo merger, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and are already dead!"
I'd be very troubled dead or otherwise. I like two of those companies and strongly dislike the third, so I'd be rather pissed.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
They look older, yes, better, IMHO, no.
There were only 2 women in the 70's picture. Did one of them get a sex change?
Gee, people blame everything on Vista. (However, I suppose if it was on a laptop actually being used in one's lap and it ran hot due to Vista's resource requirements...)
Table-ized A.I.
Sure, UNIX was on a SPARCstation, but then I tried Linux...solely to see if I could use a PC as an X-terminal off a UNIX system. It worked so well I began to wonder what Microsoft was missing.
Linux ran way faster on my 486-33 than Win3.1 did, and, more importantly, it didn't crash like Windows did when QEMM got confused.
Windows always seems to be playing catch-up. Apple got smart and built on the BSD foundation.
Microsoft did no such thing; I can't believe on a tech site like this, filled with nerds and geeks, that someone would fall into the kool aide consuming lie that is "Microsoft created the PC revolution". If Microsoft wasn't around, it could have been amstrad, acorn, amiga, atari etc. etc. Microsoft was simply at the right place at the right time with the right product for the market - and found a big name to tag along with. That is the reality, not this retelling of history I see you conduct.
goatse is more pleasant to look at
Ballmer???
That Tron http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/sakamura.html get sabotaged by Microsoft (with US government help), so tron can't enter PC OS market ?
Hey! I came here to be drugged, electrocuted and probed, NOT to be insulted! -- Homer Simpsons
The first one was shot on a medium format camera, the second on a digital SLR. It's sad how in 30 years, the image quality of the photos has degraded so much. Altho the outfits have improved, so a fair tradeoff.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Present for the reunion was office manager Miriam Lubow
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
The myth should have read:
"If it wasn't for Windows, the average person would *not* have a PC"
I do find the omission funnier...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
As a former CP/M user and as someone who worked through college in the 80s selling computers, I can not recall CP/M ever really being "healthy". It was there, but not exactly healthy.
Here was the breakdown at the shop that I worked at circa 1984:
DOS Compatibles: Compaq, Eagle, Bear, Sanyo, etc. (man the clone market was on fire back then. We even made grey boxes).
CP/M machines: Kaypro, and Osborne. The Kaypros were actually well made. I like the Kaypro's much larger screen, while the Osborne was a sewing machine with a small screen. The main selling point of the Osborne was the software that came with it.
Home computers: Commodore 64, 128, and Amiga. Atari 800 and ST.
Granted this is just my observation at the store I worked for, but here it goes:
The bulk of our sales were Commodore 64s, followed by the PC clones (Mostly Compaq and for some strange reason Sanyo). Atari 800 sales were OK. Amigas outsold STs. CP/M sales were much lower.
A competitor of ours was an authorized Apple dealer, and he couldn't keep the Apple IIs in stock.
Anyway, what killed CP/M was the following:
Clones - Who could compete with a onslaught of computer clones whose definition of PC compatible was the ability to run MS-DOS?
Price - The clones were cheaper, and easier to get.
Bad business practices - Kaypro and Osborne manufactures couldn't move product, and mismanaged the introduction of newer models. Ultimately finding themselves out of business. (Radio Shack (aka Tandy) had similar mishandling issues).
Features - MS-DOS was faster and had better file management than CP/M at the time.
Microsoft was NOT a monopoly in the 80's...
I'm sure there was something else, but this is all I can remember at the moment...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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