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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!
"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...
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
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
"Ah, 1979. I remember it well. Just five short years before I lost my virginity."
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
. . . 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
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...
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!
GP is right. I worked it out myself, with Excel.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes, why would we recognize the birth of one of the largest and most influential technology companies -- a company that largely defined how personal computer would run. Even if you don't like their products or practices, Microsoft is a huge part of personal computing history.
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.
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.
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
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 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!
Well... I would say that it really mushroomed when the Sinclair ZX 80 was made and later on ZX 81 (Timex here in North America.) 99% of my computer literate friends started on these (yes this be Europe.) Note also that these were not running MS Basic.
I was not dissing Billy not knowing about PET... he definitely knows (how could he not?) I was just referring to the blatant and consistent laps of showing "credit where credit is due." If it wasn't for inexpensive computers like Commodore and Sinclair we might have still worn lab coats at work to operate the monsters (AS/400 et.al) regardless of Billy and his associates. Now Jobs et.al. is an other matter... more in the veins of expensive jewelery more than anything else... iPhone being the epitome of this.
Note: I am happy that current "jewelery" is running Unix quite well :-D
Actually, 'decimate' means to reduce by a tenth. At least, that is the archaic meaning - when the Roman army was instructed to decimate a population, they would kill one in ten people (or one in ten men), which was usually sufficient to make a population choose subservience without reducing them to a level where they were practically useless to the empire.
But this sounds more like a bug than DRM. Presumably the code was attempting to check the value you'd just written, but was actually checking a fixed address due to omitting some indirection. Which is easy to do in assembler.
That sounds fair enough. And, in any case, Microsoft's product was embedded in ROM - certainly it was for TRS-80 and even the IBM PC has a ROM BASIC. So they didn't really need DRM for a while. Sometimes I still drool over the possibility of Windows in ROM, and am interested in Linux in ROM from the likes of ASUS for the same reason.
This is my sig.
To clarify:
1) I was NOT talking about syntax. xxxx,yy are place holders for specific fixed values that I did not provide so as not to get sued (that's a joke OK).
2) The interpreter specifically checked fixed address xxxxx for fixed value yy AFTER the command was executed. If yy was not found it errored out. This was not a check that the poke worked, it was to make it appear that the command wasn't supported (which should have been indicated by SN error, but was something else). Having hacked the interpreter myself to add/remove commands I can say it was easy enough that this was not an accident.
3) The peek command (not poke) specifically disallowed looking at the interpreter or the ROM. And I believe peek itself was also disabled initially. You had to do more poking to circumvent those checks. Who figured this stuff out (or leaked it) I don't know, but it's all documented in the Interaction newsletter - I *might* still have every issue printed.
4) As I said in my original post, this BASIC is on tape, not in ROM. The Interact ROM provided text display (bitmap gfx only 112x77) rectangle filling and tape read/write functions and not much else.
For those wondering what this odd machine was, Interact was based in AnnArbor Michigan and only a few thousand machines were produced. In a strange coincidence, years later I had a job working for the guy who originally wrote the Interact ROM.