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."

Comments

Thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

For the photo that I need for when time travel is invented, so windows can be prevented from happening.

Re:Thank you

[Mauzl]

Although your post is obviously a joke, Windows did a fantastic job of getting the PC into the lives of average people. This is something that Linux is only beginning to do, IMO.

Re:Thank you

[The Dobber]

While I'd grant you the fact that Linux is indeed powering many of the systems people interact with, it remains that Linux has failed time and again to fulfill it's Year Of Desktop boasts.

Windows, for all it's warts, allowed almost everyone access to the world of computers.

Re:Thank you

[johannesg]

Can we get rid of that horrific myth once and for all? If there had been no Windows, we would have had something else, and chances are it would have been much better.

Re:Thank you

[flnca]

Windows, for all it's warts, allowed almost everyone access to the world of computers. Well, except those who cannot afford a license.

Re:Thank you

[flnca]

Like AmigaOS, for instance.

Re:Thank you

[maxume]

Between 1980 and ~2000, the cost of a license was small compared to the cost of a computer.

Re:Thank you

[Bertie]

I'd say it held it back if anything.

I personally got into 16-bit, GUI computing in 1987 when my parents gave in to ten-year-old me and spent what for them was a load of money on an Atari ST. Over the next couple of years a lot of other kids my age followed suit and bought STs or Amigas. We were introduced to Windows (Version 2, y'know) at school and it just seemed hopelessly antiquated. We couldn't get our heads round why anybody would buy a system running this crap when they could get about five STs for the same price, all of which would run rings round the PC clone.

Of course, time passed and Atari, Commodore et al proved themselves much less proficient at running businesses than they were at designing computers, support waned and we found ourselves with no realistic option other than Windows (95 by this point). It still felt like a backward step and they'd had years to catch up.

So I reckon that if things had worked out a bit differently and, say, Commodore had been as ruthless in business as Microsoft, we'd be far ahead of where we are now. Or at least we'd have got to where we are now years ago. Windows never put a computer into my house, and it did a good job of killing off the better, cheaper alternatives that myself and millions liked me had plumped for.

Re:Thank you

[flnca]

True that, except in those years, DOS/Windows licenses could be moved between machines. Not so anymore, starting with XP activation and WGA later on. No more "one Windows license per company". This might hurt Windows sales in the long run. And besides, nothing can beat the $0 license tag of a Linux or BSD (plus optional donation). We all need money, but the exaggerated license fees for XP and Vista won't do anything good for their spreading. With WGA, pirating Windows is not really feasible anymore for those who would do that, but pirating played a major part in spreading Windows. Microsoft could have easily used dongles (or ISA/PCI cards with ROMs), for instance, but instead they put lame copy protection schemes (or none at all) in their older DOS/Windows variants.

Re:Thank you

[Ilgaz]

I had 32bit Amiga 1200 back in 1992 or something. I turned it on, said "Wow it is fast", liked new workbench and there is that "32 bit" thing. Basically every program was already in 32bit.

Amiga crashed very bad financially so I moved to x86/PC in Win 3.1/95 Schizophrenia age (my worst mistake, should be Apple).

It was like surreal people were still in 16/32 bit age, being amazed to Windows 95. It is still same way to me, even running OS X Leopard. E.g. I had 64bit command line/linux back in 2003 with my first G5 1600 switched from PC at last, so it was 64bit processor, I could install 8 gig of RAM. Now imagine I switch back to Vista 64 bit and watch people saying how cool 64bit is after 5 years.

We shouldn't have Atari ST or Amiga so we could really get impressed by these things :) It is still effecting, e.g. after the magnificent Word Processing tools in Amiga, I can't get so much excited about the Apple Pages 08. I had much of the functionality back in Amiga 1200.

Re:Thank you

[DustCollector]

Unix, born in the 1960s, had a 20 year head start over Microsoft, but Unix geeks just weren't interested in bringing a desktop to the masses in the same way Microsoft was.

It's certainly true we could have had something better -- Amiga, Commodore, Apple, etc. -- but if any one of those alternatives succeeded like Microsoft, it would have most likely adopted the same evil practices Microsoft used, and we'd probably end up with a similarly crappy system. In the alternate universe, it could very well have been Commodore Doors.

Fortunately, Linux and Mac are both making headway in the current time line.

Re:Thank you

[Ilgaz]

There was something else already, Windows and PC was the clone of it and it wasn't cheaper at all. Compare the original IBM to Apple prices. I think people can't think that the community chose that Text based horrible junk over Apple GUI and they think Apple came later to scene. It is the IBM who missed the personal computing revolution and dealt with MS in panic while MS didn't even have a single line of code in their hands.

IBM didn't heroically open their platform, they were forced to it. There are still some old school small computer shops advertising or requiring 100% IBM compatible. People should look at the reasoning of that percentage number.

Perhaps people shouldn't ignore the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" and watch/read it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_silicon_valley

Re:Thank you

[QuietLagoon]

Windows did a fantastic job of getting the PC into the lives of average people.

Windows did a fantastic job of stifling innovation in the PC industry. Imagine how much more reliable and diverse computers would have been if Microsoft had not prevented innovation from occuring? Microsoft was more concerned about monopoly maintenance than innovation.

Re:Thank you

[Ilgaz]

We are 5 or even 10 years behind in computing thanks to MS. Think about it. Who wasn't in 32bit computing except MS customers back in 1995? Did you see the Netscape 4 demos which seriously drove them into panic that time? Now we are beginning to talk about Web services in freaking 2008 and people still suffer when they try it with IE.
You better watch Archive.org "computer chronicles" videos and think what would happen if MS wasn't in scene with their business tactics and backwards products.
http://www.archive.org/details/computerchronicles
People were video editing on their Amigas back in 1991 for instance.

Re:Thank you

[QuietLagoon]

Windows, for all it's warts, allowed almost everyone access to the world of computers.

What you fail to understand is that, without Windows, something else would have filled the void. Progress in personal computers would not have stopped if Windows weren't around. Indeed, Microsoft was so concerned about monopoly maintenance, that innovation in the PC industry suffered. Progress might have been faster without Bill Gates' presence.

Re:Thank you

[billcopc]

Microsoft does charge less, to OEMs that is.

The license that is sold for $250 in-store, costs $80 (or less) to the OEM - even mom & pop shops. That's one hell of an insult to the loyal customers who actually buy the new OS to update their existing PCs, and to the businesses that buy hundreds or thousands of licenses. They can negotiate a "preferred partner" deal, but it's still nowhere near the OEM pricing.

Re:Thank you

[jayhawk88]

Valid speculation, but speculation nonetheless. It may well be the case that someone would have filled the void, but I don't think you can consider it a certainty. Consider what else was out there about the time that, say, Windows 3.0 was really taking root as the OS of choice for the masses:

- Apple's MacOS was good, but tied to a hardware platform that was horribly overpriced, which would have been a barrier for a lot of computer purchases by families/individuals
- Unix/Linux flavors. Linux was just starting out and certainly wouldn't have been ready as an OS for a personal computer for most. Unix would have been overkill/pointless in the same role.
- OS/2 would probably have been the defacto choice for most PC's, but would IBM have filled the role of Microsoft to the same level? Remember that in the early 90's IBM was still arguably in their "Computers are for businesses" mode, and like Apple saw the OS as tool for selling hardware; without Microsoft to drag them into/compete with them in the home computer arena, would they have dedicated the kind of resources necessary to improving OS/2 at the same rate that Windows improved?

Microsoft really was in a somewhat unique place to do what they did; they had ties to IBM (and others) that allowed them to get their OS's on a lot of computers, but they were still independent enough to take advantage of the then bold idea that "It's all about the software". I don't think you can say for certain that another company would have just stepped in and filled their shoes, and succeeded in bring computers to the masses as well as they did.

Re:Thank you

[hey!]

The 8088 processor was chosen by IBM for the IBM PC specifically to hold personal computing back. The processor series was a very poor choice for a desktop machine.

The 6809 was a far superior chip, good enough that a reasonably convincing Unix clone was available in 1980, the year IBM decided to create the "IBM PC". That was bad from their perspectives, because it would strengthen Unix as a competitor in the midrange business. You can still get OS-9 for embedded use or set-top box use. The 6809 shared many architectural features and philosophy with the much more powerful 68000 (which also appeared in an eight bit external bus form in 1982). This would have eased the transition to 32 bit computing, which also would have been a bad thing.

This, of course, is not Microsoft's fault. IBM didn't give a damn that the processor wasn't the best choice of a desktop OS, nor did they very much care about the fact that the "OS" they chose wasn't much more than a set of primitive libraries and provided no real hardware management at all. These were, in fact, desirable from their point of view. They wanted something quick, on which they could slap the IBM nameplate and make a lot of short term bucks selling expensive doorstops, along the way keeping Apple IIs out of businesses. They succeeded on all counts in the short term, which was all the term there was meant to be. The "IBM PC" would have been a technological dead end, it was in fact intended to be so, if it wasn't for the fact somebody ended up creating a killer app for all those doorstops: Lotus 1-2-3.

Windows 3 (ca. 1990) was a tremendous achievement, given what they had to work with. But it was technically far behind what was available at the time. MacOS 6 had been available for a couple of years, and it not only had a superior GUI, it had built in support for sound and networking (which didn't come on most PCs). There was, of course, OS-9. Even Microsoft had a better OS than Windows 3 on top of DOS, namely XENIX.

So it is true that Windows accelerated the usage of MS-DOS by the average user. But DOS itself, which was the underpinnings of Windows, held the user back. How many users had to learn the nuances of TSRs, extended memory vs. expanded memory etc? How many programers had to deal with non-productive technical details like thunks as they struggled to take advantage of 32 bit hardware with a sixteen bit operating system? How long was networking delayed by proprietary protocols shoehorned onto an operating system with no fundamental support for networking, when TCP/IP had already been existence for years?

All in all, its a mixed bag. Windows made a really bad computer with really bad system software a lot more tolerable for users, and Microsoft deserves credit for this. But they don't deserve credit for personal computing. The whole "IBM PC" and "DOS" enterprise set computing back almost a decade.

Re:Thank you

[furlongxweek]

I'm glad to hear your grandma can successfully set up and administer a Windows installation. My grandma isn't so much skilled. She just uses a few apps, and calls me to install programs and do troubleshooting, like 90% of windows users do.

Re:Thank you

[flnca]

No, the XEROX Parc was the first with a GUI. Then came Apple with the Lisa, and finally the first Mac. And after that, the Atari ST and the Amiga. AFAIK, AmigaOS was the first OS like we know it today, with 32-bit, pre-emptive multitasking and GUI. A Mac was much too expensive for the general public. Until Mac OS X and the advent of cheap Macs, Macs were not for the general public.

Re:Thank you

[Dogtanian]

Thanks to Microsoft we now have your grandma planning her round the world trip on Google Earth and poking you on Facebook, for better or for worse. Microsoft did bugger all with online services until the Internet started becoming popular with the general public. Even then their first response wasn't to embrace it wholeheartedly, but to launch MSN (in its original incarnation as a closed, proprietary network) instead.

Only when it was clear that the Internet was here to stay and that walled-garden rivals like MSN couldn't compete did MS go for it wholeheartedly. Thanking MS for the likes of Google Earth is giving them credit they don't deserve, in that area at any rate.

Re:Thank you

[multisync]

Although your post is obviously a joke, Windows did a fantastic job of getting the PC into the lives of average people.

No, that was the Internet.

The spreadsheet was the "killer ap" that got PCs on to the desktops of accountants and managers. The Internet was the "killer ap" that finally got the PC in to the homes of people like our parents. Email, the web and now digital photos of grandchildren on Facebook and Flickr have pretty much made even a dial-up account a necessity for pretty much everyone. Homeless people use the Internet.

And Bill Gates famously missed the potential of a free & open Internet until quite late in the game (I don't think Windows shipped with built-in support for TCP/IP until Windows 98, but correct me if I'm wrong).

Re:Thank you

[vidarh]

Nah - Commodore execs were too busy being incompetent and sabotaging Amiga on their own to be that evil.

Re:Thank you

[QuietLagoon]

Valid speculation, but speculation nonetheless. It may well be the case that someone would have filled the void, but I don't think you can consider it a certainty.

Nor can you take that nothing would fill the void as a certainty. Indeed, most of your argument is based upon everything else acting as if Windows were still around. That's a false premise as it is negated by the opening hypothesis, i.e., that Windows was not present. So your entire argument is based upon something that doesn't exist.

I guess I have more faith in the American ingenuity than you, and that I believe there would be a real innovator (not a fake one like Bill Gates) to fill the void were Bill Gates not handed the gift from IBM.

Microsoft really was in a somewhat unique place to do what they did

That's true. They instituted the illegal per-processor licensing scheme to build and fortify their monopoly. It's all in the court transcripts, read it there if you'd like to learn more.

Re:Thank you

[pilbender]

I hate Windows like many others at Slashdot. But you gave a nice summary of the conditions that helped Windows thrive.

Macs were the evil monsters at the time (late 80s early 90s). Hardware lock-in, expensive, anti-competitive. Thank goodness there was something else to keep us from tumbling down the Apple path. I also remembering running SCO (before they were evil) on a 486. The OS was about $2,500. A C compiler was another $2,500. You get the idea. They had no hope of mainstream acceptance at those prices and this was in the mid-90s. That was a lot of money.

I hated Windows 95, but there was nothing else except OS/2 which was better, but like you say, IBM didn't have their head in the right place for the mainstream. Linux was cool but it was weeks of time wasted to get it set up on hardware and even then you couldn't get it all working. Even back then it was stable, but it was far from being a productivity tool without enormous effort. Not that I didn't learn a ton and not that it wasn't fun.

Today... Microsoft is the evil company of our time. They were substandard in the 90s too but they were cheap and Windows ran on "stuff" people could reasonably afford. Times have changed and Microsoft hasn't. There are several other OS options that have stepped up to fill the void. In one release, Microsoft blinked and lost their marbles. They are still riding old momentum and developing to their 90s model that made them so successful. This isn't the 90s anymore. People aren't lined up outside Best Buy at midnight for their releases as was the case for Windows 95. I wasn't there for it but I heard all about it none-the-less.

The landscape is what it is. Linux is what it is. Macs are what they are. Vista is what it is. Point is... progress is being made and we're not tumbling down a path that doesn't look brighter as time goes on. Things in general are improving in the computer world. Innovation is happening, people are learning and things are getting better regardless of what Microsoft execs like Steve Balmer try to do.

If Microsoft went away tomorrow, things would be okay. Everyone would adapt with only slight pain. They were important, but that's not the case anymore. This is a really good thing. No one looks to Microsoft for innovation anymore. They aren't stopping anything. Hardware vendors who have subscribed to Vista are slowly wising up. That was the old model. Sales are down for new computers so numerous vendors are responding and starting to sell Linux systems. Apple is doing well.

Definite speculation for sure. And this is mine... Things will continue to get better and Microsoft will continue to have a dwindling role in future improvements.

Re:Thank you

[mikael]

'What was the year of Windows on the desktop?' and 'Why was Windows on the desktop successful?' and 'How did this happen?'

It has been asked many times. It was around 1995/1996, when Windows 95/NT came out. Previously, everyone used Windows 3.1, which was only suitable for reading E-mail or playing solitaire or checkers.

Microsoft's marketing slogan at the time was "Unix was legacy, Windows NT is the future", and the main selling feature was that Windows now offered a unified desktop API for writing applications, which could now all use the same command shortcuts.

A good few workstation vendors like DEC and HP believed this hype, and gave up their own UNIX OS's to switch to Windows NT. At this time, DEC Alpha's were the most powerful chip at the time, and 3D graphics cards with texture mapping still cost a three to four figure sum.

Such was Microsoft's grip on applications that some workstation vendors even had an add on i386 card just so that users could run their E-mail/spreadsheet applications in a window on a workstation.

Now, application developers want to use "skins" to customize the look and feel of their products and websites. Also, E-mail and other applications are available through any number of web browers and websites, and video can be streamed direct from the network, and not require a CD-ROM.

Re:Thank you

[I cant believe its n]

There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary notation and those who call you all the time with "windows questions".

Re:Thank you

[Skrapion]

I installed Ubuntu late last year, and setting up multiple monitors still requires editing text files.

Linux is friendly for people with a lot of skill, who need a lot from their computer and aren't afraid of the command line; or people with very little skill, who don't need to do anything but browse the web, check their email, and do some word processing.

For everybody in-between, Windows is still a clear win.

Re:Thank you

[Bigman]

I wish you'd tell my family that XP "just works" then. I've taken to wearing my "I'm not here to fix your computer" t-shirt whenever I go and see family, because I tend to spend most of my time when I'm visiting running malware destroyers, anti-virus and trying to find why bits of hardware that used to work fine are now not working.
Windows has wasted more of my life than I care to think about.. the only windows systems I have used that "just worked" have been at work, where they have teams of dedicated professionals keeping them running 24/7.
I'm not saying that Linux would necessarily be any better, I'm just saying that the old saw "Linux is not for mom and pop" is getting old; Windows is not for mom and pop either, unless son doesn't mind spending all his visits fixing the computer.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

which guy had a sex change?

Re:So...

[Brain_Recall]

I had to take a second look for that. A little reading does the trick:

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.

Should have left it as is

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Should have left it as is

[hcdejong]

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. Rubbish. History has been written, photo or no photo. The facts of the past 38 years haven't been altered by taking this photo in any way, nor will this photo change anyone's judgement of history.

You can argue that the photo's pointless, but suggesting that people would be better served by not having this information is ridiculous. This isn't some pretentious open-ended novel we're talking about.

Re:11/12

[jellomizer]

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.

My IT Dept

[Twide]

That's odd.. my very own IT department looks much more like that 70's photo than the current one..

Microsofts heritage

[^Case^]

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.

Re:Microsofts heritage

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Nobody doubts Bill Gates' vision helped bring computers to the masses a great deal, nor that OS and PC uniformising, sad as it is, is what brought down the cost of computing. The beef most people have with Microsoft is (1) how they got there, and (2) software quality : they copied, bought, monopolized, bribed and ransomed their way to the top, and they couldn't come up with one truly good software product if they lives depended on it.

Other than that, they're great guys.

Re:Microsofts heritage

[GrahamCox]

If Microsoft hadn't been the ones, someone else, or more likely several someone elses, would have. And frankly, chances are good that the state of computing in general would be ahead of where we are without Microsoft, because their monopolistic approach has stifled innovation and competition.

In the early 80s there were plenty of smaller players in the marketplace all with interesting products and different ideas. A more natural outgrowth of that which maintained that balance would have been much healthier. And while that probably would have led to a period of incompatibility and lack of standards, the lack of strong defacto standards may well have created a push for more industry standards earlier. By now many of those things that are still needed (standards for document, and multimedia interchange) would have long been settled.

For all the advantages that computers confer on society, don't forget the huge losses in both time and money that the poor quality of Windows and its apps have caused.

Re:Microsofts heritage

[Vellmont]

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.

Ridiculous. Computers gained the traction they did in society because they greatly increased productivity, and we'd already developed the technology (the silicon chip) to make them cheaply. Bill Gates just was able to capitalize on those two circumstances.

If Gates hadn't have done it, someone else would have. Jobs and Apple? IBM? Hell, maybe even Commodore.

The path taken would have been different for sure, but the entry of computers into society at the level they exist was invevidible. Maybe cross-platform applications would have become far more prevalent than they are now without Gates and Company trying to stifle any such products, and the OS would become largely irrelevant. Really, the OS IS irrelevant to the end-user. The only thing that provides any value are the applications.

Time travel

[owlman17]

Dude, please send the second terminator. I am still typing this on Windows, so apparently, the mission failed.

THE GOGGLES

[dwalsh]

etc.

Gates on the desk

[tobiasly]

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...

Plus free strings!

[Mateo_LeFou]

"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.

Re:Epitome

[Ucklak]

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.

Re:Epitome

[yuriyg]

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"

[sjbe]

Nobody doubts Bill Gates' vision helped bring computers to the masses a great deal... If Bill Gates had been the only one trying or had an insightful viewpoint I might agree with you. He was merely the most successful financially, NOT in my opinion the most visionary or even particularly helpful most of the time. Compaq cloning the original PC BIOS had a lot more to do with bringing computers to the masses than Microsoft. Mitch Kapor and Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app that really got the PC off the ground. Microsoft was merely one of many companies involved with making the IBM compatible PC the most dominant platform. Bill Gates is to my mind the poster child for the value of network effects.

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.