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Bill Gates Owes His Career To Steven Spielberg's Dad; You May, Too
theodp writes: On the 51st birthday of the BASIC programing language, GE Reports decided it was finally time to give-credit-where-credit-was-long-overdue, reporting that Arnold Spielberg, the 98-year-old father of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, helped revolutionize computing when he designed the GE-225 mainframe computer. The machine allowed a team of Dartmouth University students and researchers to develop BASIC, which quickly spread and ushered in the era of personal computers. BASIC helped kickstart many computing careers, include those of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, as well as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
As far i know, neither microsoft nor apple did actually stole code.
MS-Dos was actually bought (by a stupid low amount, but bought neitherless), and the Xerox copying was made from the ground up based on what they saw, rather than actual code stealing.
Unless there's something else i'm not aware of, like the BSD TCP stack thing being actually stolen etc...
Says someone clueless about MS history.
On the contrary, only someone clueless about MS history could fail to know that his parents (both of them, in fact) were instrumental in his access to that market.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Then you need to learn. Bill Gates stole code HEAVILY and constantly. Steve Jobs as well. Woz was a true geek and did not, in fact he was reprimanded for sharing.
... by using sleazy business tactics and copying features (if not outright code) from his superiors:
Gary Kildall's name is not known today, and Bill Gates's is, because Gates's Microsoft Corporation produced an operating system that was a variant of CP/M, called QDOS. Microsoft licensed it to IBM as PC-DOS (and marketed its virtual clone, MS-DOS), using its business tactics to shut Kildall out. Still, Kildall continued to innovate. He created a multi-tasking version of his operating system that allowed users to do more than one task at once. He released an improved operating system, DR DOS, packed with features reviewers found lacking in Microsoft's offerings. Kildall even pioneered work on interactive videodisks and CD-ROMs, as well as PC networking software and wireless connectivity.
Kildall was bitter. He said DOS, which Microsoft bought from Seattle Computer Products, copycatted all the best features in CP/M, and that Gates then made DOS just different enough to be incompatible with CP/M. He threatened to sue, but never did. Particularly galling for Kildall was having to compete in the IBM-compatible market with a clone of what he saw as his own work.
Ask anybody who Bill Gates is today, and they know. Ask them who Gary Kildall is, and they probably don't. That's because Gates was a sleazy businessman, not because he created better tech. It's the dirty players who win the game.
QDOS was inspired by Digital Research's CP/M, but it was not a copy. It was written from scratch by Tim Patterson for Seattle Computer Products.
However, MicroSoft's original BASIC was copied from Digital Equipment Corporation's BASIC.
I worked for IBM in the late 80s and these guys were even toxic inside the company. They led us to the first layoff of the IBM history early 90s.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Kindall was bitter because he screwed up. IBM approached him first and wanted to buy CP/M, but Kindall didn't make the sale. Why that happened is lost in the mists of time, but Gates saw the value in the deal and made it happen.
XEROX actually licensed it's technology to Apple in hopes that Steve Jobs could successfully bring products to market, because XEROX had no ability to turn it's bluesky tech into things people wanted. Their mouse cost hundreds (in 1981 dollars), and was not terribly reliable. Apple had to redesign everything, write their own code, etc.
The licensing deal was basically Apple sold them $1 Million in stock, at $10 a share, prior to IPO, Apple gets everything they want from the PARC portfolio. That stock would have to be worth 9 figures today so (assuming they were smart enough to not sell) they got paid.
So nobody stole code. Apple got extremely annoyed that they'd given XEROX all this money for GUIs and Mouses and things and MS just went in and copied it themselves without paying XEROX anything.
Why did IBM sign the contract with Gates?
They were subject of a long, draining, anti-trust investigation from '69-'82; so being in full control of their platform could have caused legal problems.
They also had very little tech that could be quickly turned into a PC, because they'd sat out the Minicomputer revolution of the 70s. It would have taken them five years to make a product from scratch. And by then they'd be five years further behind. Which would have been really bad. They started development of their non-GUI PC in mid-1980, and Apple came out with the GUI Mac in April of '84. They would have hit the market right when the Amiga came out.
So they decided to make a computer from easily available parts (ie: Intel's chips), and already viable software (ie: DOS was a clone of CP/M, which ran on Intel chips already). They offered a variety of OSes (CP/M, PC-DOS/MS-DOS, and p-System). It took them roughly a year to get from plan to market.
PC-DOS/MS-DOS was most popular because it was cheapest and Bill Gates made sure it was branded as "PC." Nobody got fired for buying IBM, and buying the PC-Disk Operating System for an IBM PC made sense. As part of IBM's attempt to ape the then-dominent Apple II, the architecture was supposed to be open, and in the accelerated timeframe of getting the machine out the door agreeing that Bill Gates could sell his own MS-DOS on other machines probably seemed like a) part of the open architecture they were going for, and b) not a battle worth fighting; not to mention c) proof for the Justice Department that we aren;t an evil monopoly bullying poor little Billy Gates and you should stop investigating us.
As far i know, neither microsoft nor apple did actually stole code.
Microsoft stole VMS code to help make Windows NT. Perhaps more precisely, a VMS team headed by Dave Cutler stole the code from their employer, DEC, and took it with them to work for Microsoft where they developed NT.
DEC did not seem to mind very much though. By that time it seemed that their business model was to allow their staff to walk away with code and then settle for an out-of-court payment from the company it had gone to. That is what they did with Microsoft.
A DEC guy's account