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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.
You need BASIC to steal someone else's operating system and run a company based on illegal anti-competitive business practices?
Where the fuck does this sort of chaining end?
Spielberg's father would never have been able to design the mainframe without the food grown by the farmers who grew the food that he ate.
The farmers would have never been able to grow the food in their fields had these fields not been cleared of trees by earlier farmers.
These earlier farmers would never have ended up in America had it not been for their pilgrim ancestors who came over a century earlier.
These pilgrims would not have come over to North America had it not been for the persecution they faced from the medieval Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church would not have existed if it had not been for a Palestinian man named Jesus getting nailed to a cross by Romans.
The Romans wouldn't have been in Palestine had it not been for Clementine IV and his urge to expand the Roman Empire.
Clementine IV only became emperor of the Roman Empire because Cladius II was assassinated by angry Carthaginians.
Carthage only exists because proto-humans from sub-Saharan Africa migrated to the edge of the fertile shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
So by this line of thinking, Microsoft and Apple are both owe their existence to half-apes who crawled out of the jungles of Africa some 1.8 million years ago.
BASIC was the language i learned how to program (every basic thing someone needs to know about programming, BASIC had it) - it was pre-installed to the R.O.M. of my Amstrad CPC 6128 (i love you dear old friend...) and ready to use - really that simple, start the machine and... type:
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Without skullduggery, we would know Bill Gates as "that embedded BASIC guy". And there would be nothing wrong with that, either. It would certainly be better than "headed corporation convicted of deliberate anti-trust actions", although he certainly is spending a lot of money to Rockefeller his way into a cushier spot in the history books.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes: IBM - the company known for hiring the very best in legal expertise signed away their arms and legs
Why? - I would like to know that!
What I do know is that Bill Gates was a completely unknown school kid until he was brought to IBM's attention by his mother, who was a high-up at IBM. Digital Research was well known. When Garry Kidall did not believe IBM had sent people to see him, somehow Mrs Gates must have been on hand to say to the right person "Check out my son - he is a genius and has written and OS" probably having no idea of the difference between and OS and an interpreter. (Would your mum know the difference? Would she have in 1980?) (mine would, and I have some idea how rare that was). QDOS was known to Bill Gates, who had, indeed, written some software (and a few others) and he spotted an opportunity when it hit him right between the eyes!
Whether Bill Gates or his Dad (who was a very well known lawyer) wrote the contact with IBM, I don't know. Why IBM signed the contract without their lawyers reading it properly, I don't know. In my view the whole thing stinks. (Though I recognise that IBM's decision making was coloured by buffoons who thought they would be lucky to sell 10,000 PCs.
Here in the UK, most people involved in software at the time (like me) did almost nothing for the year that elapsed between rumours that IBM might make a PC, and the first one being delivered, because their employers wanted them to be instantly available to port the company's existing products to the PC - the entire industry knew it would be a game changer. Read the magazines from the time: It was like "Apple is going to make a phone that will run 3rd party apps" x 1,000!
Incidentally, Intel had a perfectly good OS at the time called ISIS but refused to sell it to anyone!
I also don't know why you need a GE225 to write BASIC, surely the most machine independent interpreter ever.
Disclaimer: I wrote an ISIS/CPM clone, but my employers refused to sell it because they said "No one would buy software written in the UK!" - and they were a UK software company"
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
It was the clone market that actually handed MS control of the IBM PC, neither of which parties could have foreseen.
"IBM recognizes that MS will be licensing the MS Product Offering 1.1 to third parties".
Methinks that whoever put that line in the contract had foreseen the clone market. Its very unlike the IBM of yore not to insist on exclusive control and it must have taken some effort to avoid that. If MS hadn't been able to license MS-DOS to the clone makers, they'd have had to license CP/M or clean-room their own DOS clone, which might have limited the clones' compatibility and certainly wouldn't have made money for Microsoft!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.