Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Arg. I don't care how shit you think the Windows OS is, Gates' philanthropy is worth it.
Are you sure of that? 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?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
You mean Windows 95? Yeah, poor Gates. While Apple was making computers that looked pretty and people wanted to use, Microsoft was making computers that did vital work and people had to use.
I'd dare-say that Gates's plan was cleverer than Jobs's.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
C'mon, by now it should be known that sales have nothing to do with product quality but rather with marketing. And you have to give it to MS, they have a brilliant marketing department.
If you don't know how purchases are done in companies, you've never been in the situation where you should be the one responsible for purchase and acquisition, until some manager comes in telling you you absolutely HAVE to buy $product because he just came back from a business trip to $holiday_resort with $salesperson_for_product and it's so absolutely awesome...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Gates vision doesn't matter, it was IBM-PC clone makers who made it possible. It could have been any OS that could run games, ANY.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
BECAUSE Gates and others had the vision of a putting an affordable computer in every home, millions of youngsters today have the opportunity to learn, who may not have been exposed to comptuers unti they reached college age.
Huh?
How do you figure Microsoft had anything to do with it?
First off, IBM PCs and clones were originally for business use. For home use people used Apple ][, TRS-80, Commodore PET Sinclair ZX-80, Acorn BBC micro, etc, etc. Nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft.
The idea of making computers based on commodity hardware and open standards wasn't new to the IBM PC (and had nothing to do with Microsoft). Before the IBM PC + DOS standard there was the S-100 bus and CP/M.
If Microsoft had never existed it'd just mean that IBM chose another OS for the IBM PC, or obtained DOS direct from Seattle computer rather than via Microsoft. If the IBM PC never took off then the existing S-100 + CP/M would have continued until something better came long. And in the meantime the hobbyists would still be running all the other computers being produced by everyone else!
Whilst a "standard" has its advantages, unfortunately Microsoft aren't comparable to other standards. Can anyone come along and write their Windows compatible OS? Are there other companies doing so? No. It would be like if there was only one company that could make VHS or Blu-Ray, or if all computers were made by IBM.
But until that happened, there wasn't the same relentless drive for faster, better, cheaper computers that we take for granted today. The Commodore 64 was popular for years with identical hardware. The scale of the market didn't support constant research and development of faster consumer hardware.
Firstly, this has nothing to do with the OS, and hence Microsoft. The credit would be to the PC - the open nature meant companies were continually improving it. However, even there you are wrong to say computers didn't improve on other platforms. There was a continual improvement of computers, from simple 1K computers, through increasingly powerful 8 bits, then 16 bit and 32 bit platforms like the Amiga. And anyway, the PC had discrete generations too, such as 086, 286, 386, or the graphics standards. The only difference was that there were a lot more models.
Even if there's no other reason to like Microsoft, just be thankful it wasn't Apple that become the standard. It could have been a lot worse.
I agree here!