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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.'"
BASIC is good only for teaching the "programmers mindset" in how to reason and think with code. The language itself does nothing but teach you terribly bad habits that will plague your code if you use anything else.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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's easy to assume that the money wouldn't have been donated otherwise, but it's really hard to say for sure, and Gates' fortune is chump change compared with the many, many billions that have been lost to the products bugs, sluggishness and security problems.
Defend Windows all you wish, but it still a stolen operating system written with stolen computer time using the universal escape character as the directory separator with a terminal shell that is still inadequate even today. If Bill Gates had gone to jail for the criminal things that he did, as he should have, and Commodore had allowed Toys 'R' Us to sell their computers, then we would have had Quadraphonic Sound, Real Time Animation, Preemptive Multitasking, and thousands of colors on our screens by 1985. Basically we would have had 80% of the computer capabilities of XP in 1985. Instead, Micro$oft legitimized criminal behavior in corporations under the label of 'marketing'. What Microsoft should be famous for is killing the concept of corporate honor.
There is nothing to defend, and Bill Gates can go to hell.
You are engaging in an ad hominem (personal) attack and creating strawmen arguments, and saying there is no point to dialog, which all suggests your points are weak.
The term "financial obesity" comes from the author James P. Hogan, who is one of the most optimistic people around, believing strongly in the value of learning and effort and advanced technology. Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
But even market capitalism cannot function if wealth is too centralized. You'd be right that physical wealth is not a zero sum game -- but financial wealth can be a zero sum game especially when you make it so by using financial wealth techniques to create artificial scarcity -- like monopolistic techniques that have been found by multiple courts to be illegal even under legal systems designed to support artificial scarcity.
The central irony of today's society is how often post-scarcity technologies like automation, robotics, the internet, biotech, nuclear energy, and even bureaucracy are used to create artificial scarcities for someone's private gain instead of abundance for all.
War is part of that, whether military war or economic war:
"WAR IS A RACKET" by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler - USMC Retired
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
I did not use the word "guilt"; you did. Maybe Bill Gates sees problems in a world still threatened by nuclear war, by bioengineered plagues (perhaps weaponized Lyme like President Bush got?), by killer robots like the drones that allegedly killed children in Pakistan by an order given within three days of Obama taking office, where billions of people still live in poverty and diseases despite enough global abundance for all, and in the middle of an enormous global financial collapse?
Bill Gates knows something is wrong, just like Alan Greenspan admitted something was wrong, but he just does not understand it, because, as Einstein said, problems usually can not be solved by the same type of thinking that created them (your reply being an example? :-).
"I Was Wrong! Alan Greenspan"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55-A1-D3MR0
For many years, Forth was a better OS, language, and editor than MS-DOS and BASIC. Bill Gates only got a chance to build on IBM's monopoly because of internal fighting within IBM and also his mother's social connections. Then, after that, QNX was a better OS. Smalltalk was better too as a language and IDE, and Bill Gates even admitted that somewhere. But monopolistic practices let Bill Gates succeed while technically better solutions failed in the market.
Our society often socializes external costs and systemic risks, while privatizing gains (like the recent banking bailout instead of just giving money to the people to spend). And above are links to three people, a successful author, a decorated military general, and the previous director of the Federal Reserve, all essentially saying that. But, when someone tries to point out stuff like that, you say they have a "poisoned soul", without knowing anything about them, and without in the slightest trying to evaluate the historical truths they point to.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Those quotes are to show how the replied to poster's assumptions about work, equity, their own future prospects, and so on have flaws, and that people have pointed those flaws out for decades. And as Marshall Brain suggests, it's just plain suicidal to believe in conservative hard-work-gets-you-ahead economics in an age of increasing automation (and better design), because most jobs will be automated, leaving people to starve. One alternative is significant social change towards a basic income (social security and medicare for all, regardless of age or income). What we are seeing here is a fundamental clash of ideologies and assumptions. The world in its worst economic crises since the 1930s, and I'd suggest the jobs are mostly *not* coming back. As Einstein said, you generally can't fix problems with the same sort of thinking that created them. But I'm labeled the "Troll", not the people who created this mess for their own short-term gains? I can see that suggesting Millionare-Wannabees are the shock troops behind the failings our our society has really hit a nerve.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The wealth another man has or controls is irrelevant if his posession of such does not prevent me from generating enough wealth to meet my needs."
It's called political campaign donations. It's called monopoly and cartels. It's called comparative advantage. It's called out-bidding. It's called privately funded education and private tutoring. It's called back room deals. It's called buying advertising. It's called getting lots of tries to get it right. It's called keeping the others desperately poor so they have no choice but to deal on your terms and be cheap labor.
From: ... First of all, "hard work" is only a small piece of the equation. In reality, success in the market is about market position. It isn't about what you do, but about what you control. The hardest work is actually done by people whose market position makes their daily wage minimal. The person who profits most from their labor is the person who owns the factory they work in. While there are certainly examples of factory owners who started with nothing and rose to be "captains of industry", for the most part our captains of industry started out a lot further ahead of the game.
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
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This is the difference between say, George W. Bush and you. Dubya went to prep school. You went to the public high school. Dubya went to Yale - ahead of someone with better credentials because he had family connections. Dubya had wealthy friends, through family, "skull and bones", etc, who bankrolled his oil drilling business. Ask some of his friends to bankroll your oil business. Let me know if they stop laughing before their bodyguards throw you out. Even if you managed to persuade an investor to bankroll some enterprise, you're going to have exactly one shot. If you lose, you won't be getting a second chance. Dubya, on the other hand, went broke, and then his friends bankrolled him again, before finally getting him a one percent share of the Texas Rangers.
See how it works? People with money help each other out. They don't help out people who don't have any. Many cheap-labor conservatives don't want to help out the destitute at all. They say government assistance to people will make them "dependent". They say it breeds "inefficiency" and "laziness". They say that a harsh "got mine, get yours" social environment breeds "market discipline" by rewarding the most resourceful and competitive. Some extreme cheap-labor conservatives don't even believe in public education. They say it is the family's responsibility. If your family can't afford to send you to school, well, that's not their problem.
Of course, wealthy elites shower their own with benefits - and enjoy a plethora of government benefits and services. They know the value of education, that's why they keep expensive private schools like Andover in business. In fact, they do everything they can to give their own children every advantage money can buy, because they absolutely understand the value of a "head start" in the fiercely competitive social jungle they have created. They talk about "competition", but they actually fear it, and do what they can to make the playing field as unequal as they can. Then they tell the wage earner that his position is "his fault", and that he just needs to work harder - in their factory. He needs to more "disciplined" and "thrifty" if we wants to "get ahead".
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There are always exceptions to these general trends. Steve Jobs, for example, is something of an exception. He got lucky (even though he is also, like Bill Gates, hard working and talented). But you can be sure Steve Jobs has been doing his best for a long time to make sure a lot of other potential Steve Jobs' In never get their chance to run the next Apple. It's a crazy way to run an advanced technological society where war over economic issues could quickly lead to Arm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Considering that the wealthy, the middle class, and much of the poor (who still drive cars, have air conditioning, and posses multiple TV's in the US) possess material wealth of a manner and quantity that didn't exist 100 years ago, who did they steal all that wealth from?"
You're certainly right in suggesting that the organization of matter into forms humans desire is the creation of wealth (the poster you are responding to got that wrong). And you are certainly correct that we have more stuff in the USA than ever (See Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey's "The Age Of Abundance").
But, as financial prospectuses always say: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". You can't conclude from the poor having more stuff now that things won't change dramatically in the near term unless we actively try to reform a winner-takes-all social ideology. Reforms might include instituting a "basic income" to keep the market working (funded by a wealth tax perhaps or other means), helping gift economies prosper like GNU/Linux by more supportive laws like shortening copyright length to a few years or limiting its scope to only commercial transactions, and helping people be more productive locally in various ways where they keep or share the results of their own production from home 3D printers or neighborhood TechShops or local farms by helping individuals relearn productive skills and have access to the resources they need to do that.
Also, while we have a lot more stuff, so much that we are getting buried in it in the USA and people make movies like WALL-e that don't even sound too far fetched, we also have a lot more cancer (half of which comes from environmental causes) and a lot more risk of global Armageddon from nukes, bioweapons, killer robots, and global financial panics. We also have a lot less species and less nature. One can argue if that was a good trade overall, but in any case, it is a done deal. But here is another way to measure progress than Brink Lindsey's approach:
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm
"We believe that if policymakers measure what really matters to people--health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being--economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability. Redefining Progress created the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) in 1995 as an alternative to the gross domestic product (GDP). The GPI enables policymakers at the national, state, regional, or local level to measure how well their citizens are doing both economically and socially."
Is Bill Gates lobbying for any of that? No, he is busy moving his R&D to India, trying to get more staff under H1B visa indentured servitude to get the most for the cheapest labor costs, trying to pay less taxes to support those workers that improved productivity from software makes redundant, and likely trying to extend the scope and duration of patents and copyrights he owns -- at least, until, like the Grinch who stole Christmas, he has a change of heart. Then, his vast talent and skills could help renew our society, physical infrastructure, and our ecology, like happened at the end of the movie WALL-e (if you stayed for the credits):
"WALL-E Credits"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6wgicmUAfw
The issue is, where do we go from here? Mainstream economists ignore the value of social capital, like intact extended families and intact neighborhoods. Brink Lindsey ignored social trends, for example, how the USA has one of the lowest scores on life expectance and childhood happiness of the industrialized nations, and how hundreds of years earlier the natives had a socialist economic system that was working so well that Benjamin Franklin borrowed lots of ideas from the Iroquois Confederacy to write the US Constitution. They also ignore systemic
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.