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Bill Gates Remembers 1979
Hugh Pickens writes "Last week Gizmodo had a special celebration of 1979, the last year before a digital tsunami hit, that put Bill Gates in a nostalgic mood this week. Bill chimed in with his own memories of that seminal year when everything changed. 'In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion,' wrote Gates. 'By the end of the year we'd doubled in size to 28 employees. Even though we were doing pretty well, I was still kind of terrified by the rapid pace of hiring and worried that the bottom could fall out at any time.' What made Gates feel a little more confident was that he began to sense that BASIC was on the verge of becoming the standard language for microcomputers. 'By the middle of 1979, BASIC was running on more than 200,000 Z-80 and 8080 machines and we were just releasing a new version for the 8086 16-bit microprocessor. As the numbers grew, we were starting to think beyond programming languages, too, and about the possibility of creating applications that would have real mass appeal to consumers.' Gates remembers that in 1979 there were only 100 different software products that had more than $100 M in annual sales and all of them were for mainframes. 'In April, the 8080 version of BASIC became the first software product built to run on microprocessors to win an ICP Million Dollar Award. Today, I would be surprised if the number of million-dollar applications isn't in the millions itself' writes Gates. 'More important, of course, is the fact that more than a billion people around the world use computers and digital technology as an integral part of their day-to-day lives. That's something that really started to take shape in 1979.'"
Sweet. Just go back to 1979 and we can prevent it all!
Please visit http://www.mederbil.com/ i7, GTX 275, 4 1TB Caviar Green in RAID 0+1 array, EVGA X58 3X SLI Board, Silver
Microsoft doesn't release an operating system in 5 years - people bitch. Microsoft releases a new operating system - people bitch. Microsoft's operating system drops some legacy support for some apps - people bitch. Despite Microsoft giving literally over a year of public betas for hardware vendors to get their drivers up to scratch, they don't - people bitch at Microsoft. Download Squad makes a bunch of childish remarks - everyons agrees.
How many of you have actually used Vista on decent hardware (post-2004) and had problems with it? That doesn't include: I don't like the search features, I don't like the fact that 512 megs of my 2 gigs of ram that I don't use anyhow are taken up, I want my 5 extra frames of Counter-strike back that were way above my monitor's response time and refresh rate back.
Been using Vista since Beta 2 and haven't had any problems aside for some Nero 7 incompatibilities (that were fixed during RC1) and some ATI driver issues during RC1. Just as stable as XP (didn't have any problems with it either, so I can't say more stable), more responsive and generally better to use.
I know some of the more senior geeks here will scoff, but I learned programming with BASIC back in 2004-2005. I know there's a lot of hate for Microsoft and VB, but I fondly remember the simple language that built the two.
Those poor bastards, they have us surrounded. Now we can fire at them in all directions!
This is in no way related to TFA, but the mention of old school Bill Gates reminded me of an article someone recently pointed me to. It's about Bill playing a game called "Petals Around the Rose" in 1977. While the game itself is pretty interesting, the story about how Bill approaches the problem says a whole lot about how Microsoft operated in the early days. Notably that he could completely miss the point of something, but he'd get close enough by bruteforcing things. It's an interesting parallel to how Microsoft has always mimics its competitors, and why their imitations don't always hit the mark.
"In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees [...] By the end of the year we'd doubled in size to 28 employees."
With arithmetic like that no wonder Windows is the sleek model of perfection it is...
But it shouldn't be too surprising that there might be so many million dollar products today compared to 1979 since the dollar has been decimated in value since in the last 30 years by inflation. A million dollar app in 2009 dollars would be worth nearly $3M.
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
Yep '79 was a big year of change. I cut my hair, put away my bellbottoms, and quit smoking p... Well, 2 out of 3 of those. With the exception of disco everything was better. I blame StarWars.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
1) Wow. Must be pretty cool to have the richest man in the world read, and write for, your blog. I'm sure there were 9 layers of PR people between Bill and Gizmodo, but still. Damn.
2) Almost as important, 1979 was a good year for Lego, too. I remember the original space sets well.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I got my first real PC
...
Bought it at the CompUSA
Coded 'til my fingers bled
It was summer of '79
Me and some guys from school
Had a company and we tried real hard
Jimmy quit and Jody got married
I shoulda known we'd never get far
Oh when I look back now
That summer seemed to last forever
And if I had the choice
Ya - I'd always wanna be there
Those were the best days of my life
Can't say i did much in basic, but the one language i cut my teeth on was turing. I still remember the final project myself and a friend teamed up on wouldn't run on any of the school computers (at the time, we incorporated SVGA mouse driven 3D-menu systems and 16-bit sound). I had to lug my old, steel cased, full sized tower system that weighed a ton or more, into the school to demonstrate the program to our teacher in order to get the credit for it.
Would of made my buddy bring in his system, but i lived closer to the school... damn that was a long walk back home with plenty of rest periods to gather my strength before contining on with the system...
memories....
"Ah, 1979. I remember it well. Just five short years before I lost my virginity."
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
the digital tsunami hit way before 1979, and plenty of us had been running BASIC (and better languages) on our microcomputers for years before that, and it wasn't a Micro-Soft product
1979 is an amazing song, not sure why Bill(y) is talking about computers now.... Wait a second, Gates who?
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
. . . actually started a decade earlier with IBM. The MTST and MCST word processors first brought microprocessors to the desktop.
Dear Sir,
Good day and compliments. This letter will definitely come to you as a huge surprise, but I implore you to take the time to go through it carefully as the decision you make will go off a long way to determine the future and continued existence of the entire members of my family.
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is William Gates, the 2nd husband of the widow of the late head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces of the federal republic of Nigeria who died on the 8th of June 1975.
My ordeal started immediately after her husband's death on the morning of 8th June 1975, and the subsequent take over of government by the last administration. The present democratic government is determined to portray all the good work of her late husband in a bad light and have gone as far as confiscating all her late husband's assets, properties, freezing our accounts both within and outside Nigeria. As I am writing this letter to you, my son Mohammed Abacha is undergoing questioning with the government. All these measures taken by past/present government is just to gain international recognition.
I and the entire members of my family have been held incommunicado since the death of her husband, hence I seek your indulgence to assist us in securing these funds. We are not allowed to see or discuss with anybody. Few occasions I have tired traveling abroad through alternative means all failed.
It is in view of this I have mandated DR GALADIMA HASSAN, who has been assisting the family to run around on so many issues to act on behalf of the family concerning the substance of this letter. He has the full power of attorney to execute this transaction with you.
Her late husband had/has Eighty Million USD ($80,000,000.00) specially preserved and well packed in trunk boxes of which only my husband and I knew about. It is packed in such a way to forestall just anybody having access to it. It is this sum that I seek your assistance to get out of Nigeria as soon as possible before the present civilian government finds out about it and confiscate it just like they have done to all our assets.
I implore you to please give consideration to my predicament and help a widow and her new husband in need.
May Allah show you mercy as you do so?
Your faithfully,
William H. Gates III
N/B: Please contact Dr Galadima Hassan on this e-mail address for further briefing and modalities
But it took until 1984 for him to see what the real desktop computing revolution would look like, and it took him more than a decade after that in order to make a Mac knock-off that didn't completely suck donkey balls.
Mod me down or flame me all you want Gates fans, but you know I'm right.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Why are we commemorating the birth of one of the biggest, most expensive, and egregious organised crimes against civilisation, again?
Let's have the party when Microsoft is finally shut down and Gates is in jail where he belongs.
you had me at #!
it can't wear the latest fashions
Hmmm, from TFS:
most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion
So it appears it never could... but then again, me neither. At least I finally got rid of my taped up coke bottle glasses.
Free Martian Whores!
The summary has the sales figure for the million dollar award wrong... it's, well, a million dollars.
I wonder what Microsoft 8080 BASIC was priced at, and how man copies $1M respresents... certainly not very many.
It was more like 1977...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET
Just a friendly reminder Billy, don't diss the real start.
I still have my 8080-based Interact computer from back then AND a (legal) copy of MS BASIC for it on tape. One thing I distinctly recall is that the Peek and Poke commands did not work out of the box. For Poke, you had to first enter "poke xxxxx,yy" or poke would result in an error. The poke command itself would execute, and then check this address for yy and return an error for any other value. A sort of lock. Not sure if Interact or MS decided to put this in. There was another series of things to do to unlock the peek command. IIRC there was a separate lock on the 2K rom address range. Do I still get in legal trouble if I post the values of XXXX,YY?? They are still burned into my brain. Does anyone at Microsoft still have this basic or know how to unlock these commands? I wonder...
Bill Gates railed on about hobbyists stealing his software, when he in fact stole computer time from the university to build a commercial product.
Today's magic word is queerer
i love the smashing pumpkins reference
thank god someone does...
GP is right. I worked it out myself, with Excel.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... I learned fuckin' PASCAL so I could shit on the faces of BASIC geeks. Structured programming. Compilers. Serious fuckin' shit. BASIC was for nerds, PASCAL for jocks. Fuckin' line numbers, who's the loserboy that needs them? Can't you fuckin' edit your instructions without useless references?
And for the real uberjock, there was Assembler. Fuckin' interpreted languages couldn't hold a candle to Assembler. OK, there was this shit about every damn machine having a different architecture but who cares, no pain no gain.
Want to know the best thing about computer classes? They were full of nerds. First we gave them all a good beating, then we would put the chairs straight on their twisted backs and sit on them.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Gates' fortune is chump change compared with the many, many billions that have been lost to the products bugs, sluggishness and security problems.
If that were true, then Windows products would not be considered a positive investment, so therefor, they would not be getting purchases. The fact of the matter is that the sluggishness, bugs, and security problems are often more FUD spread by competitors than they are actual reality. Indeed, Linux has more than its share of bugs, sluggishness and security problems, as you find out every time you do the product updates...
This is my sig.
If it weren't for Windows' stranglehold, OS design would be probably a decade ahead of where it is now, millions of man-hours would not have been lost to fixing/cleaning up malware/etc, and we'd all probably be a little bit richer. Is one multi-billionaire philanthropist worth a thousand multi-millionaire philanthropists?
Insightful?
Nothing but speculation and conjecture.
If not Windows-some other OS would be filling that void.
Pathetic what gets modded insightful these days.
Why is that I hear Ballmer chanting: statistics, statistics, statistics...
.com bubble years... c'mon Bill, a little sanity check before you spread FUD on your bread...
200,000 microcomputers in 1979 and all Microsoft customers? I highly doubt that... where did this Bill guy get the numbers from?
Microsoft was founded only 4 years earlier and even though Bill had a $1 million fund from his grandpa, I don't see how he could market his software to 200,000 customers within just 4 years... maybe he was using the Traf-O-Data algorithm to count them...
anyhow, those weren't the
Can I put a spell on those who can't spell?
Your wheels are loose and they're losing their grip, good you're there.
Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make
Is that most people who are not millionaires but are working to become one would freely admit that they if they don't get there, its because they weren't good enough. You can work hard, study hard, etc, but, if you aren't good enough, you don't get to make the team millionaire. But along the way you do grow from what you do. You've tried to build a business, have made products, have made some sales, have learned about your gut and how the world really works. Those things you can only get from stepping into the ring, as Teddy Roosevelt so famously observed, and that, there's a certain thing you get just from getting in there and putting up your dukes.
What is important to us is having the opportunity to try and chase one's goals, and, if you listen to what we say, you would hear that over and over again - the Constitution doesn't guarantee success, but the right to pursue it. Nothing in life is guaranteed. The American dream is not getting rich per se, its about having the opportunity to try. When you guys on the left ramble on about guarantees, you've missed the point of life altogether. You want to have all of these guarantees for yourselves and in doing so really undermine your own ability to say, at the end, that you lived your life yourself. You want to trade away the opportunity for order, just because, you don't think you can succeed. That's just utterly pathetic.
So yeah, Bill Gates got rich. I didn't. Maybe I never will. I don't care and Bill Gate's wealth doesn't bother me. He got the opportunity to live his dream and I got the opportunity to live mine, and however I use my opportunity, my life, is my business, and has nothing to do with him, and has nothing to do with you.
This is my sig.
. For Poke, you had to first enter "poke xxxxx,yy" or poke would result in an error
Well yeah, you had to enter Poke in the correct syntax.
The poke command itself would execute, and then check this address for yy and return an error for any other value. A sort of lock
No, you would expect reasonably that it would be an error. You write something, and you check to see if it wrote successfully. No conspiracy here. Now later I think MS would learn that you didn't want to check the value set by Poke because you might be poking a one-way register... but hey.
IIRC there was a separate lock on the 2K rom address range.
Well, you can't poke into ROM, because, its well, ROM... In your case if you tried to poke into ROM, then, your value by definition could never be set, and the poke would fail. See above.
This is my sig.
It should also have learned the difference between its and it's. Maybe another 30 years are needed for this mind-boggling concept?
I attended the the 2nd West Coast Computer Fair in 1978 in San Jose. I remember Bill as a skinny red hair kid promoting BASIC in the MSFT booth.
:-)
These computer fairs were exciting. Before them, computers were mainly sold by corporations to other corporations. They were locked up then in central IT facilities. (Well, some things never change
I was a ovum waiting for my dad's sperm to come.
1,000,000 software applications x $1,000,000 = $1,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion dollars)
Seems a bit high.
blog & fiction: jd87
Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.
It's a poor, twisted soul that even thinks to call wealth 'financial obesity', or refer to it as an illness. It's an even sicker person who sees our society as 'destroyed.' I'll give you weakened, perhaps, but for entirely different reasons than you would hold.
Unfortunately there's no point in arguing the matter further with the authors you linked to, or yourself. The philosophical background, psyche, and emotional state required to believe those sorts of enervating ideas are so utterly different from my own, that any discussion would be wasted. Discussing the point at hand would leave a thousand necessary premises undiscussed, and nothing would come of it.
That being said, I'll leave you with this: holding such ideas will poison your soul and make you miserable, while benefiting yourself and your fellow man not one wit.
The thing is, he knows something is wrong. He started a foundation to help the world. He is just so socially enmeshed in a dying ideology of artificial scarcity economics that he doesn't know how to fix it, and he surrounds himself with people who just produce more of the same rather than thinking outside the scarcity box.
It's even more evidence of a poisoned soul that you see the only possible reason a rich man would engage in charity is guilt. And while you talk of 'artificial scarcity' economics, your anti-wealth rant is based on an 'artificial scarcity of wealth' philosophy- that is, the only way it could possibly be wrong for a person to accumulate as much wealth as Bill Gates is if he's depriving someone else of something.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. It's more like lighting candles- if I light your candle, I still have my flame. The generation of wealth is very real and quite possible to prove within a paragraph or two. I'll leave it to you to consider for the moment.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The winner of this digital explosion also shut it down for the last 20-25 years by 'partnering', crushing, or outright STEALING such good ideas that you just can't get investor money for Windows-based projects.
Why do you think the internet, with it's web-based, not Windows-based tech continues to grow?
Linus might think it a 'disease', but I have a hard time being 'fair' when it comes to a people that very nearly shut down the tsunami so all the profits could be theirs. Work for a company shut down by their lawyers (or their fragile software) and you'll feel the same way.
So I'm charmed to hear what he remembers of those days. Imagine the thousands of employers unable to remember their early days, bringing technology up, because they never got to grow under the thumb of the modern "Phone Company". (AKA monopoly, for you young kids out there.)
Maybe it's time to let others think, work, and grow too?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The Imsai 8080 that my dad built from a kit. The TV Typewriter terminal. The Pickles & Trout video interface. Loading an ill-gotten copy of 4k BASIC by pulling punched tape through a reader, later loading Extended BASIC via a Kansas City standard cassette tape interface. Building wire harnesses in the garage for Synetic Designs' FDS-1 dual 8-inch floppy disk drive system (and getting paid $20 per!). Hunt the Wumpus, Hammurabi, even Star Trek!
Those were the days.
Now get offa my lawn, you damn kids!
Since the Commodore PET, the Trash-80 Level 2 and various other circa-77 computers ran Microsoft BASIC I rather think BillG knows about them.
The point of TFA is not that 1979 marked the birth of the personal computer, but was the point at which things really started to mushroom. Sounds about right to me.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Thats too bad, because ive got love for you..... if you were born in the eighties.
How many of you have actually used Vista on decent hardware (post-2004) and had problems with it?
I have, but the problems were very mild and the computer really did feel faster than XP. Copying gigs of data through identical versions of iTunes was significantly faster. I also enjoy looking at Vista much more: no more 1-pixel-wide fonts when using 1920x1200 resolution. It still lags behind a modern Linux distro in the look and feel department, but it's clearly an improvement over "Windows 2000 with a blue Start Bar."
Ultimately, I reverted to Windows XP because of sound latency issues with Vista. I'm only using Windows on that machine to run Traktor DJ software, and Vista with its new audio driver model introduced latent and choppy sound that I did not have with XP. Also, my cheap MIDI-to-USB converter had significant and sporadic delays in Vista - sometimes close to half a second - that are almost unnoticeable with XP. It's really fast hardware, but I think Vista's DRM-laden driver models are way too eager to delay that information long enough to make the OS useless for my purpose.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Can someone help debug my php? 20 $i = 1; 30 while ($i != 10) { 40 $i++; 50 }
I found the problem, you don't have any GOTO in your BASIC, err, PHP code!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
admitted they're really scraping the bottom of the tech blog barrel.
10 Sin 20 Goto Hell
Who?
I say things which affects my Karma negatively. (and I don't care) For instance; All religion is false.
I remember during the Windows Vista launch period how Microsoft were touting it as a feature just how many new jobs would be created in the IT sector doing Windows Vista support.
If Vista had have taken off, he would have been spot on the money. Whether or not this is a good thing, I'll leave up to the reader to decide.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
... once the laptops I have to fix allow people to do any useful work.
The amount of disk trashing Vista and its applications does is truly appaliing.
We are talking about machines with 1 GB of memory and recently modern (less than 3 years old).
I put Ubuntu on the same machine for my personal use and have not experienced all the latency other people with Vista in the same hardware are.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We just have more people who can afford plumbing, big screen televisions, etc because they are getting cheaper to make.
And widespread access to the creature comforts of life supports your argument how? What is wealth for? Specific dollar numbers are going up and down, but access to the modern benefits that wealth provides is quite widespread....
So what are you complaining about again?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
That's a mighty vague definition of "wealth" you have there.
Money, and what you can buy with it. Simple enough for you? We exchange money for goods and services, so 'wealth' might include the ability to use goods and services as you choose.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Oh don't eat me, I'm too little I am. Wait a bit until the second Billy Goat Gruff comes. He's much bigger.
And no, I've never used Vista. The grass on the hill over the other side is much lusher.
POKE 53280,0: POKE 53281,0 = Fade to black.. well, really quickly like instantly... :)
It was not 13 in that original pict, IT WAS 11 !!!
How our minds EXPAND things as we get old and senile !!
Does anyone besides me think Gates is an alien hybrid, loook into those BUGGY EYES !
http://blogs.msdn.com/mithund/archive/2008/06/27/before-after-the-original-11-who-started-microsoft-albuquerque-picture.aspx
Ah. the good old days of POKE.
I remember having a BASIC program crash and finding it was because the Starship Enterprise had flown off the screen and embedded itself in a line of code. This was on an OSI Superboard which had a character set filled with useful stuff like aliens and spaceships instead of lower case letters. The downside was that nobody told Microsoft this so you'd get messages like "S[front-half-of-a-spaceship] Error at line 110".
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.