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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."
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?
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.
Come on. The average age seems to be less than 30 years on the 1978, hence the average would be less than 60 today. I'd say the chances that all the people still being alive are pretty good. Cheers.
Unselfish actions pay back better
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.
well working making a new company having it grow to such a large level tends to put extra age on some people. Heck look at the guy in the middle in the before and after pic. Before he was a young guy and the other picture he is a older lady, that looks more like a traditional grandmother image.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
etc.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
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...
"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
FTA:
Present for the reunion was office manager Miriam Lubow (center of new picture), who missed the original sitting due to a snowstorm. (When Lubow, now retired, first met Gates, she couldn't believe that disheveled kid was the president.) Absent for the reshoot was Bob Wallace (top center), who died in 2002; after leaving Microsoft in 1983, he pioneered the idea of shareware.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
...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.
Thanks for pointing this out, I noticed that as well and started to suspect there was a Wachowski brothers thing going on.
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.
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...