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.

Comments

Responsible for Apple and Microsoft both?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's 98, I don't think naming and shaming is necessary at this point. Just sit back and wait, justice will happen any day now.

Re:Responsible for Apple and Microsoft both?

[Z80a]

They're terrible, but not 1980 IBM terrible.
If you think the "think different" fanboys are bad, its because you didn't seen the "Nobody got fired for buying an IBM" ones.

Re:Responsible for Apple and Microsoft both?

[Stormwatch]

Can we blame him for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" as well?

Re:Responsible for Apple and Microsoft both?

[AchilleTalon]

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.

Theft

[trewornan]

You need BASIC to steal someone else's operating system and run a company based on illegal anti-competitive business practices?

Re:Theft

[Z80a]

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...

Re:Theft

[trewornan]

QDOS code was copied from early versions of CPM

Re:Theft

[Anonymous Coward]

You need BASIC to steal someone else's operating system and run a company based on illegal anti-competitive business practices?

Oh FFS already. Let... it... go.

Is it really necessary to have this pent-up rage and hate over a company for so long? There's a reason Slashdotters are seen as a joke - they can't move on. I don't see the value in the emotional effort to keep hating for so long. It's a waste of energy. No-one else cares anymore... except on Slashdot.

Move on with your life.

Re:Theft

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Theft

[CODiNE]

Let's not forget Stacker.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Re:Theft

[Bing Tsher E]

I remember Stacker, and all the other horrible third-party shit you had to do because Microsoft hadn't incorporated it into the OS as a built-in service.

Imagine Linux where the gzip utility wasn't included, and you had to choose from an array of third-part compression tools, one of which was being loudly advocated by your cornball Uncle.

Stacker was definitely part of the 'plaid pants' era of the Personal Computer when anybody could rent some cheap shop-space and become a 'computer expert' to his locality.

Re:Theft

[trewornan]

So Paterson claimed - I guess it was never definitively proven to be stolen but we have an eye witness account of Kildall demonstrating QDOS used CPM code.

Re:Theft

[trewornan]

Trouble is it's not all in the past. Microsoft is still up to the same old tricks and continues to be as much of a blight on the computing world as ever.

Re:Theft

[Gavagai80]

Considering the billions to be made in copyright infringement lawsuits, it's safe to say that no, the evidence of copying did not even rise to the SCO level.

Re:Theft

[NicBenjamin]

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.

Re:Theft

[NicBenjamin]

Your literacy leaves something to be desired.

From the link:

Xerox willingly invited Apple representatives to visit its PARC think tank after signing an agreement that invested $1 million into the computer maker in the hopes that Apple could take PARC's raw technologies and make them commercially successful in the consumer market, using mass manufacturing, product development and marketing expertise that the academic computer scientists and engineers at Xerox lacked.

It's kinda hard to "take PARC's raw technologies and make them commercially successful in the consumer market" if you don't have a signed agreement stating that Apple can use PARC's technologies.

Re:Theft

[nukenerd]

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

Re:Theft

[sjames]

You may be mis-remembering Stacker. Stacker did compression at the block level back in the days when 30MB was a big hard drive. Gzip is a file level user program.

Re:Theft

[nukenerd]

Is it really necessary to have this pent-up rage and hate over a company for so long? ..... No-one else cares anymore... except on Slashdot.

Two reasons spring to my mind straight off :-

(1)There are many people around who think that Gates and Microsoft invented the computer, or at least the personal computer, or at least invented the GUI, or at least made PCs affordable etc etc, when in fact Gates and Microsoft were copying others. As a result these people, some of whom have a lot of power over policy, mistakenly believe that Gates is a genius and that we should listen to everything he says on any subject and do what he says. I won't bother to link to examples, they are everywhere. It is therefore important to debunk Gates and to keep debunking him, and his company.

(2) Microsoft continue to cheat and to attempt to control the IT world right up to the present day. This is not just about history.

Re:Theft

[ganjadude]

really? please elaborate because i havent seen them do anything insane in a decade plus

Re:Theft

[ganjadude]

)There are many people around who think that Gates and Microsoft invented the computer, or at least the personal computer, or at least invented the GUI, or at least made PCs affordable etc etc, when in fact Gates and Microsoft were copying others.

no one thinks they invented the PC. no one thinks they invented the GUI. but they did in fact make the PC affordable.

Re:Theft

[wumaj]

I am not sure what version of DEC Basic you are talking about but Basic Plus on RSTS/E was far more sophisticated than Microsoft Basic.

Re:Theft

[Creepy]

Pretty sure Microsoft bought a license from Seattle Computer Products that allowed them to sell DOS under their own brand. That was one reason Killdall wasn't able to sue Microsoft - their lawyers basically redirected any lawsuits to SCP. I recall SCP attempted to pull the license later and sued for something like $60 million and eventually getting just under a million (and Microsoft getting to keep the license).

Most versions of BASIC mimic'd the DEC version, and most wanted to be the first on new platforms. Gates had one of the first versions on Intel processors, for instance. Apple's Integer BASIC (or Game Basic, as Woz called it) was based on HP BASIC, which Woz grabbed from his office at HP, which I've heard was a weird mutant BASIC.

Re:Theft

[jmccue]

really? please elaborate because i havent seen them do anything insane in a decade plus

Eh, Secure Boot http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Re:Theft

[Agripa]

And by inspired do you mean reverse engineered? No way is inspiration enough to develop an OS in 3 months.

How much experience do you have with CP/M? Its application programming interface and data structures as well as the mass storage data structures were very well documented before the 8086 became available. I have no difficulty in believing that someone who was already familiar with them could write an implementation in 8086 assembly within a period of months.

Re:Theft

[ganjadude]

while i am not a fan, id hardly call that evil, as long as you can still get MOBOs without it that is

Re: Theft

[ganjadude]

im not saying there were not other cheap options. but to say that windows and MS didnt have anything to do with bringing down the price for the masses is disingenuous

Re:Theft

[trewornan]

Do a Google search for Jerry Pournelle - I don't have to spoon feed you.

Re:Theft

[Agripa]

It was not hard to find references to this but nobody has been able to reproduce it or find the code or strings in the source or executable.

Re:Theft

[nukenerd]

no one thinks Gates and Microsoft invented the PC. no one thinks they invented the GUI

No-one here on / but plenty in the wider world. Just one example from a quick Google "We all know that Bill Gates created the personal computer"

.... but they did in fact make the PC affordable.

More bollocks. In the UK I bought my first personal computer, an Amstrad (with CP/M and a printer) for 400 GBP ($600) when an IBM PC with DOS (and no printer) cost around 1200 GBP ($1800). I, and other young techies at the time, regarded the IBM PC as a corporate machine that was unaffordable (and undesirable) for home. Even at work very few people were issued with one. The subsequent spectacular reduction in IBM compatible PC prices was due to falling hardware costs and owed nothing to Microsoft. It owed more to Alan Sugar and the manufacturers of hard drives and memory.

Today the price label on a desktop or laptop is typically a quarter of the 1980 price label, while Microsoft's operating system price label has trebled, having gone through a period in the 90's - the very period when PCs became "affordable" - when it was five times the 1980 price. The percentage of the cost of a PC that goes to MS for their pre-loaded operating system was 3% in 1980 but is typically 20% today.

I suggest you watch this interview with Sugar to hear what a dominant and frustrating part Microsoft's OS price was in setting the price of the PCs he made and sold.

Re:Theft

[Zero__Kelvin]

You are technically correct that Microsoft most likely didn't steal actual code. However, Apple had pernission from Xerox PARC to use the GUI concept, and Microsoft subsequently used it without said permission. The bigger part of the controversy was that Gates lied to Jobs and claimed to be using Apple provided systems to make a better Word for Mac, when in fact he was using it to see how it work effectively stealing the overall concept, and in an especially unscrupulous fashion.

Re:Theft

[Anonymous Coward]

This article does a (rather naive IMHO) code analysis comparison of DOS and CP/M:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/did-bill-gates-steal-the-heart-of-dos

He basically calls bullshit on Pournelle's story, but without any further information it's impossible to say whether Kildall successfully inserted an "easter egg" copyright notice that showed up in DOS.

Re:Theft

[houghi]

and the Xerox copying was made from the ground up based on what they saw, rather than actual code stealing

Ask Apple if just seeing a rounded corner is stealing or not.

Re:Theft

[ruir]

Actually rumours were QDOS originally was cross-assembled and a little bit massaged to work. Now that if they were true, no idea.

Re:Theft

[ruir]

Don't get me started on stacker, which was eventually bought by MS and incorporated into DOS (6.20?). It was brilliant for the time and at the same time dangerous. Many lost their data to it. The least hardware or disk corruption and you were toasted.

Re:Theft

[Samizdata]

Don't get me started on stacker, which was eventually bought by MS and incorporated into DOS (6.20?). It was brilliant for the time and at the same time dangerous. Many lost their data to it. The least hardware or disk corruption and you were toasted.

[looks ashamed and stares off in the distance as he raises his hand]

Re:Theft

[metaforest]

Integer BASIC on the Apple ][ (not the Apple ][+) was written from scratch by Woz. It is a mutant implementation because it used what we now call a VM embodied in Sweet16, a 16 bit virtual processor. Most of Integer BASIC's core functions were written in this interpreted 16 bit VM. Sweet16 was designed to allow a programmer to easily blend Sweet16 instructions with native assembly code with almost no overhead.

Integer BASIC was an order of magnitude faster than AppleSoft BASIC. It was often used as the executive in video games of the era on Apple ][+ and later machines with Apple Disk ][ drives. Integer BASIC could be loaded into High-Memory or into the Microsoft designed 16K Extended Memory Card that had the ability to bank out the System ROMs. This allowed games developers to leverage a lot of the code in Integer BASIC for their games. It also made reverse engineering such games difficult as calls into the Sweet16 VM would completely confuse most disassemblers of the era. A key reason that Integer BASIC was used this way was that XREF source code for Integer BASIC and Sweet16 were published in early Apple ][ Reference manuals. The XREF source for AppleSoft was not readily available until much later, and even when it was, leveraging it as a runtime library was very difficult.

The Apple ][+ and later Apple //e, //c, //gs models used AppleSoft BASIC, (Floats for all numeric processing) which was written by Microsoft and licensed to Apple. Microsoft later used the license for AppleSoft BASIC as a bludgeon when Apple tried to develop a BASIC interpeter for the Macintosh that would have supported building stand-alone Apps. Apple was threatened with losing all rights to AppleSoft BASIC if they continued development. MacintoshBASIC was quietly suffocated in its crib, and Microsoft quickly announced Microsoft BASIC for Macintosh, an early implementation of what eventually evolved into Visual Basic (BASIC with labels instead of line numbers).

Reference: I was an in-house contractor at Apple SQA as a test engineer from mid-1984 until 1988, and then again from 1990 through early 1992.

More like to his own parents

[drinkypoo]

It's well-documented that Billy Gates' success is largely due to having rich and well-connected parents.

Re:More like to his own parents

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:More like to his own parents

[gweihir]

Would not surprise me. He certainly did and does not have any reasonable engineering skills. On the other hand, inf the field of sabotaging competitors....

Re:More like to his own parents

[tomhath]

Lots of people have rich and well connected parents. There's only one Microsoft.

Re:More like to his own parents

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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.

Re:More like to his own parents

[tomhath]

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.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Anne Thwacks]

You were obviously not there at the time. Bill Gates got rich because IBM signed the daftest contract in computer history from their point of view.

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"

Re:More like to his own parents

[plopez]

His dad gave him $2 million dollars after he dropped out of school. I certainly would not have gotten any money from my parents if I had dropped out of school. His dad was a well connected lawyer, who helped guide MS in the early years, and got prominent businessmen to serve on the board of a fledgling MS. His mother was from a well connected banking family.

With those sorts of advantages how could you fail?

Re:More like to his own parents

[plopez]

The legend is he was hang gliding.

Re: More like to his own parents

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: Why doesn't the UK have a computer industry?

A: Because they haven't figured out how to build a computer that leaks oil.

(An oldie, but perhaps some of the young n's here haven't heard it yet. I just hope they get it.)

Re:More like to his own parents

[Megol]

One word: BASIC. Everything else came later.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Livius]

That's unfair - Gates was also very lucky.

And, like it or not, Gates did actually have a lot of talent at what he did. His problem was that all he knew were personal computers - personal as in standalone and non-networked.

Re:More like to his own parents

[swillden]

It helped with Billy's mommy was on the IBM's Board of Directors. So he got the sweet deal of licensing his software, instead of selling it outright.

No, Mary Gates was never on IBM's Board of Directors. She was on the United Way board, along with John Opel, then CEO of IBM. This may have helped Gates. Still, I don't see any reason Kindall wouldn't also have been able to get a licensing deal. There's no evidence he tried.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Bing Tsher E]

He personally wrote the Word Processing app on the TRS-80 Model 1. In 8085 Assembly Language.

What were you doing at the time? Blowing into the connector end of your Nintendo cartridges?

Re:More like to his own parents

[gnupun]

Why? - I would like to know that!

Maybe IBM executives considered PCs as toys compared to mainframes and not likely to generate much revenue. So they outsourced almost everything -- CPU, RAM, OS, programming language. It's also probably why the inventors of GUI didn't value their own creation... instead, Steve Jobs profited from that.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Bing Tsher E]

Kildall and Digital Research also produced the GEM graphical user environment. Which at the time rivaled Windows and was in some ways significantly superior to Windows on the PC environment.

GEM was sued and pretty much shut down by Apple. They shut down ALL the competitors to Windows on the x86 hardware platform. In actuality Apple's litigiousness cleared the playing field so that Windows was the 'last man standing' and thus Apple set up the Microsoft/x86 dynasty.

Re:More like to his own parents

[swillden]

You were obviously not there at the time. Bill Gates got rich because IBM signed the daftest contract in computer history from their point of view. 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!

I don't think it's so strange. IBM didn't expect the PC to be a success. It was a niche project pushed by a few execs over the objections of more -- who saw it as undercutting IBM's real business, to whatever degree it was successful -- and ignored by most of the company as irrelevant. Other parts of the company were actively trying to kill the project. The group developing the PC needed an operating system and needed it quickly. They couldn't take the time to build one, assuming they could find the budget, and likewise couldn't pay a lot of cash up front. Licensing an existing OS for a low per-unit cost was an obvious win.

And, of course, by the time it became clear that the PC was a success, it was too late to change OSes, and by then Gates would've been a fool to sell. Besides, the cost to IBM was low and the machines were selling well. As long as IBM was the only company selling PCs, there really was no significant downside to IBM, and IBM was confident in its legal teams' ability to shut down clones... until Compaq performed a successful clean-room reverse engineering of the PC BIOS.

It ultimately boils down to lack of foresight, that the PC would be so important, and that IBM couldn't prevent clones. Without understanding those, IBM had no reason to insist on ownership of the OS.

Re:More like to his own parents

[phantomfive]

, although he certainly is spending a lot of money to Rockefeller his way into a cushier spot in the history books.

Which should be encouraged. Few people are all good or all bad, and there are certainly worse things he could do with his money.

Re:More like to his own parents

[swillden]

Maybe. But IBM approached Kindall first. I strongly suspect that if he'd said "Sure! I'll license it to you for $5 per machine", IBM would have done the deal with him. There really weren't any "back room" negotiations required; it was a pretty straightforward deal.

It is perhaps possible that Mary Gates learned that IBM would be interested in a licensing deal, but I'm skeptical that John Opel would even have known that much about the project. IBM was an enormous company and the PC project was a small effort that nearly all of the company thought was irrelevant. It occurs to me that perhaps Mary Gates talked to Opel and found out that he didn't know much about it, and realized that the project didn't have much internal support, and from that deduced that the execs in charge were fighting internal opposition and might see a licensing deal as a way to get to market faster and cheaper before they could get shut down.

But all of that is purely speculation. What is clear is that (a) IBM did approach Kindall first and he ignored them, and (b) an OS licensing deal was good for the PC project. I see nothing to indicate that IBM wouldn't have accepted such an offer from Kindall.

Re:More like to his own parents

[NicBenjamin]

GEM went on. It was doomed more because it's business model was obsolete then the lawsuit. The days in which computer geeks were the main market for an OS were over, and they apparently never bothered to negotiate a licensing deal with XEROX.

MS also got sued, but apparently they had a license agreement from John Sculley which covered most of it, and the rest was either uncopyrightable, XEROX';s copyright, or so trivial nobody cared (ie: codefendent HP had a "trash can" icon) they were able to win. Apple dragged out the case until Steve Jobs came back and negotiated that famous cease-fire with Bill Gates in '97.

Re:More like to his own parents

[NicBenjamin]

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.

Re:More like to his own parents

[swillden]

Heh. That shows what I get for relying on my memory rather than looking it up again.

I'm particularly embarrassed that I followed a previous poster's lead in mispelling Gary Kildall's name.

Though, as the article you linked explains, Kildall did have a chance to make this deal and blew it, leaving it to Gates to pick up. Had Kildall been a better businessman Microsoft would never have become what it did, regardless of Gates' mom's connections.

Re:More like to his own parents

[NicBenjamin]

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.

You could actually buy an IBM PC with CP/M on it from the factory from about six months after IBM PCs were introduced.

But Kindall fucked that up, to. He charged more ($240 according to wikipedia) then Bill Gates ($40) did, not understanding the huge advantage MS-DOS would get from being the dominant OS on an open platform.

Re:More like to his own parents

[miller701]

Pretty much this. They didn't except it to be a big deal

The model 5100 didn't sell all that well, why would the 5150 do all that much better?

Re:More like to his own parents

[sjames]

Interestingly, even his history with Altair BASIC is a but checkered. Since he developed it using an emulator running on his school's mainframe, technically they owned the code, not him. I think that's a raw deal, but they would have been perfectly justified in billing him for the expensive computer time he burned up without authorization, at least. Even still, he had accepted a fair number of pre-orders and was over a year late delivering when someone pilfered a tape roll from him, fixed the remaining bugs in short order and began distributing fixed copies. That's what inspired Gates' somewhat infamous open letter about copying (never mind that the guy that pilfered it did so because he had paid and gotten nothing in return).

To me, that more or less set the tone for MS a few years later.

Re:More like to his own parents

[sjames]

As they say, born on 3rd base.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Creepy]

Killdall thought the personal computer thing was a fad, so yes, was completely to blame for that.

As for Microsoft's part, you've got to give Gates some credit - not only did he try to negotiate with Killdall, when he did ink a deal with IBM, Microsoft had no OS experience but promised it in a ridiculously short time-frame. That was solved that by licensing an existing DOS and rebranding it. I can also sort of see why IBM would think he could do it, being the first to get BASIC working on Intel processors, the same ones IBM planned to use.

I didn't really see them as shady until they started making exclusive deals with vendors for cheaper software, often bundled software like DOS and Windows (and later Office) for about the same as other vendors were just selling DOS as long as that company signed a deal to sell no other vendor's software.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Creepy]

GEM was doomed more from Microsoft's exclusive licensing agreements with vendors. That is when I saw it and all other competition to DOS/Windows vanish from the market. GEM was awesome, too, especially compared to early versions of Windows. Microsoft had two extremely crappy versions before anything comparable came out, and they didn't even do that right until the first point release (3.1).

Re:More like to his own parents

[trewornan]

like it or not, Gates did actually have a lot of talent at what he did.

You mean he's a natural crook?

Re:More like to his own parents

[trewornan]

Perhaps he should use it to refund all the people he ripped off.

Re:More like to his own parents

[gweihir]

He does not have enough money for that. And neither has he enough money to make up for the damage Microsoft did in delaying innovation and killing good but competing technology.

Re:More like to his own parents

[gweihir]

Hero worship is so quaint when it completely ignores reality. You may want to look for a less fake and evil hero though...

Re:More like to his own parents

[Richard Elmore]

That IBM signed that contract is not nearly as crazy as it sounds (today) when you look at what was going on 50 years ago.

IBM was involved in an anti-trust fight over the way they excluded 3rd parties from making peripherals for their mainframes and they did not want to give the DOJ any additional ammo. At the time the real money in the computer industry was in the mainframe market (which IBM pretty much owned) and the PC market still looked a lot like a hobbyist thing.

IBM did what corporations and individuals almost always do, try to protect what you have now rather than risking that on an uncertain future thing.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Tablizer]

my employers refused to sell it because they said "No one would buy software written in the UK!"

Your marketing dept. needed better liars. There never was a dBASE I because they called the first version II to give it credibility, for example.

Re:More like to his own parents

[Dog-Cow]

He probably does have enough money, though, to hire some hitmen to torture you to death. Shame he's not interested.

Re: More like to his own parents

[gmiller123456]

Usually, when you say something is "well documented", you provide some evedence of those documents. I'm not doubting it's true, but I've never seen anybody produce a reliable souce of information that says it's true.

What about the farmers who grew their food?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What about the farmers who grew their food?

[Hognoxious]

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.

That explains quite a lot.

P.S. Over a dozen posts and nothing about systemd?

Re:What about the farmers who grew their food?

[plopez]

MS BASIC was the system of the 1980's. OK, are you happy now ;)

Re:What about the farmers who grew their food?

[plopez]

systemd was what I meant. I swear my original post said systemd.

Re:What about the farmers who grew their food?

[itzly]

Microsoft and Apple are both owe their existence to half-apes

So, we came full circle ?

Re:What about the farmers who grew their food?

[Bing Tsher E]

I have a book in my library titled: "Microsoft BASIC And It's Files" by dilithium press, copyright 1982.

Reading the title today, one would think that it was a book that examined the internal structure (the 'files') of Microsoft BASIC.

No, in fact it's a book that teaches how to use the File Manipulation features on the various computers (TRS-80, Osborne 1, etc.) that ran Microsoft BASIC. It's very open-ended like all Personal Computing books of the era, because one could never know at that time exactly how someone had bootstrapped their computer into running Microsoft BASIC, one could only assume they had gotten there somehow.

Re:What about the farmers who grew their food?

[sjames]

There actually is a point to that. Very wealthy people like to perpetuate the myth that they did everything with their own two hands from nothing but dirt, but there is no truth to it. Behind each and every one stand a rather large number of people who did a lot more for a lot less reward.

Re:What about the farmers who grew their food?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.

It is quite interesting you stop at that point, with misinformation to boot. Homo sapiens are full apes, nothing half about us. And the chain did not stop (or start) 1.8 million years ago. Making stone tools 2 million years ago, bipedalism may be four million years ago, primate line specializing in fruit eating 30 million years ago, mammals branching off 210 million years ago ... We might all everything to the Big bang sparked by Lord Vishnu at the end of the previous universe 14 billion years ago. But looks like there was a previous universe, so... It is Big bangs all the way down buddy.

Cordiner's Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article seems to say that the then-CEO of GE didn't get it, and tried to block development of a computing group within GE. The wrap-up says that the current CEO has finally realized Cordiner's vision. I was half expecting the article to finish that sentence by saying "...by finally firing all those idiots who thought computing had a future."

Started my career

[Anonymous Coward]

I can then credit him with inspiring me to become a software engineer. BASIC started my own journey into developing software oh so many years ago...

Thank you!

[antiperimetaparalogo]

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:

• 10 print "Bill Gates is a good person - haters gonna hate..."
• 20 goto 10

Re:Thank you!

[Bing Tsher E]

I prefer:

10 A$=""
20 A$=A$+INKEY$
30 PRINT A$
40 GOTO 20

Run it, and start typing random stuff on the keyboard.

The first crappy language I encountered!

[gweihir]

Basic was so bad, I learned assembler. And then PASCAL, and C, and many more. As examples of really bad technology go, BASIC is a true gem!

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[AchilleTalon]

First example the excellence of a product has nothing to do with business success.

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[gweihir]

I completely agree. Customers are stupid, and those that rip them off the best make the most money. Microsoft and Apple are excellent examples of that.

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[jones_supa]

Programmers are stupid too, so if they can get away with a dumbed-down programming language like BASIC, that's their choice.

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[plopez]

It was a teaching language; it resembles assembly, Fortran, and COBOL; pushed into production and was very harmful; http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BasicCo...

But of course since we learn nothing in IT and software development we had to do it again; http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/re... . It was a teaching language for the love of Mike.

Probably because larval PHBs had only one computing class in college and so it was what they dictated when placed in a decision making position over IT and programming departments. Footnote, I see the same thing happing with Python these days. Being pushed into unsuitable roles because that is all anyone knows.

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[itsdapead]

Basic was so bad, I learned assembler. And then PASCAL, and C, and many more.

(Pedant point: 'BASIC and Pascal' not 'Basic and PASCAL' - only one of them is an acronym).

Except that BASIC was an interpreted language that would fit into an 8K ROM with room to spare for a rudimentary OS, and happily run on a microcomputer with 4K of RAM and no disc drive. This was when a floppy disc drive and controller cost twice as much as the original computer. Try using a compiled language without a twin disc drive (possible, but no fun). Telling someone that they should be using Pascal on their ZX81 or Vic 20 is just plain stupid: Its like whaling on PHP without explaining how you get Tomcat, server-side Python or Haskell on Rails* running on your cheap/free shared web hosting package.

Anyhow, as soon as computers got more powerful, BASIC started to gain proper control structures, meaningful variable names, named procedures etc. and anybody with any aptitude started using them and/or other languages. The "BASIC is harmful" meme just means that BASIC made programming accessible and interesting to a far wider range of people who maybe weren't going to grow up to be master programmers.

And no, the true gem of really bad technology is bog-standard ISO Pascal - the one with no 'real time' screen/keyboard I/O, no defined way of associating a Pascal file with an actual file in any form of filing system apart from naming the file on the command line, and what was presumably a deliberate parody of the "goto" command (you can only jump to defined labels that have to be declared in advanced but which can only have numerical names...) There were, of course, decent, but nonstandard, implementations of Pascal - but I think C won because both K&R and ANSI specified a substantial library full of useful I/O and other stuff based on the Unix API.

(*I really hope that I just made that up)

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[Creepy]

Woz felt he needed a high level language on his computer, as well as one that could be used to write and play games. The 4k minimum memory on the Apple I and Apple ][ were so the computer could run them in BASIC, even though that made them "100-1000x slower." Woz wrote his own BASIC (based on HP BASIC) from scratch with no knowledge about how to write a compiler, though he did borrow some school papers from his friend Allen Baum. He felt FORTRAN was for engineers and chose BASIC because he wanted regular people to be able to write and run programs in it, and wanted to run the games in a book of 101 games in BASIC (don't know if that is the exact name - something like that). He demo'd Breakout, written in Integer BASIC to Jobs and showed how easy it was to change little things like block color, something that would require a hardware redesign to do in software.

BASIC may suck, but the reason it was chosen was it was a programming language targeting beginners, not engineers (the effing name tells us that - Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). I too have a lot of disdain for it, but the fact is it was my first programming language and I probably never would have learned to program had I not learned that (and graduated to writing assembler by the time I was 12).

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[Tablizer]

It had the advantage that editing was easy and consistent across vendors. You type in the line number and it's there. You retype it with different code and it's changed. You type the number without code and it's deleted. In the teletype era this was a important.

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[gweihir]

A good macro-assembler allows far, far better style and structure than classical BASIC. As to Python, it can be used as a teaching language, but the instructor must really know what he/she is doing. If so, you can teach imperative, functional (with limits) and OO programming with Python, and you can make sure that people understand that static typing is only a crutch and must not be relied on. And then you can branch out into writing modules in C and reinforce how OO actually works as Python uses OO C code for extensions (yes, that is plain C OO code). Of course, at this point most instructors will long since have reached their limits. With an incompetent instructor, any language will be bad for those learning.

As to "unsuitable roles", you should worry more about Java, JavaScript and the like. They are now putting JavaScript on the server, pure madness, because that have no programmers, only people that know JavaScript. (A real programmer is not tied to a language and only loosely to a paradigm. There are far too many 1-trick ponies that call themselves "programmers".)

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[gweihir]

Haskell on Rails*

Now you have done it! Expect this to be the new hot thing soon....

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[gweihir]

As I said, it is an excellent example of a really bad tool that just barely gets the job done. I fear that many people are not capable of the personality development you describe, namely looking at other tools and comparing. Otherwise there would not be so many 1-trick ponies in the form of Java or JavaScript "programmers" around.

Re:The first crappy language I encountered!

[gweihir]

I do not disagree. But in the stone-age, a nice stone was all you had if you were lucky and it did suck as a tool.

...What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we only had computers and spinoffs because of space?

Re:...What?

[Anne Thwacks]

You might want to look up Edwin de Castro, and Ken Olsen.

I personally, look up to both of them.

Space (specifically the Apollo program) was responsible for a purchasing program that drove logic ICs down to consumer level pricing - without which PCs would not have reached the volume that drove the prices far lower.

Analog ICs would not have got far without the logic ones, because production tolerances were so loose that the concept of "it works or it does not" was critical to volume production of ICs in the early days. (Yield was under 3% for the 7400 family (first TTL logic ICs)).

Re: ...What?

[Anne Thwacks]

Yes there were cnc macines in 1964. But early ones were not compter driven Even early PDP8S had discrete logic, that was because early logic ICs were VERY expensive. ãSPã TTL was not widely used till ten years later (1974)

Re:...What?

[Anne Thwacks]

I have watched the video. The computer was used for CAD. There are no ICs in a computer of that era. The one shown quite possibly used vacuum tubes. My Mum worked on similar machines in the 1960's with vacuum tubes.

The drills, mills and lathes were controlled by tape, but there was not a single IC in their control systems. I have seen machine tools of this era with the motion controlled by relays and vacuum tubes. Certainly not ICs.

It is obvious you were not there at the time. [lawn, etc]

Re:...What?

[Samizdata]

You might want to look up Edwin de Castro, and Ken Olsen.

I personally, look up to both of them.

Space (specifically the Apollo program) was responsible for a purchasing program that drove logic ICs down to consumer level pricing - without which PCs would not have reached the volume that drove the prices far lower.

Analog ICs would not have got far without the logic ones, because production tolerances were so loose that the concept of "it works or it does not" was critical to volume production of ICs in the early days. (Yield was under 3% for the 7400 family (first TTL logic ICs)).

You want to narrow down the De Castro reference a little? I know of Olsen already, but I am sure the first couple pages of Google were NOT what you meant for De Castro.

Bill Gates owes his career

[rsilvergun]

to his father's millions and his mom's seat on the IBM board of directors, but yeah, I guess I'm splitting hairs.

Re:Bill Gates owes his career

[ganjadude]

she never had a seat on the IBM board, it was the united way board, which the IBM CEO at the time was also a part of. Nit picking I know.

Re:Bill Gates owes his career

[Rockoon]

Its not nitpicking when you are exposing propaganda spread by biased liars.

GE invented BASIC?

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon that's a pretty weak link. Dartmouth's Kemeny and Kurtz invented BASIC, with the help of tools, one of which was the GE mainframe.

BTW Kemeny was a pretty impressive guy. He was President of Dartmouth College for 10 years (in the '70s, when Bill Gates was launching Microsoft), and he wrote a well-regarded textbook on finite math which I'm guessing Bill Gates studied. A later edition actually contained a chapter on the BASIC language.

After Kemeny passed away in his early sixties, someone published a revised edition of Kemeny's textbook. It's on the web somewhere as a PDF, I think.

Re:GE invented BASIC?

[itsdapead]

ISTR from when I read it (a long time ago in a library far, far away) the Kenemy & Kurtz book on "The BASIC Programming Language" was a good read, too.

Joint IBM Microsoft Agreement ..

[DougPaulson]

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".

Joint Development Agreement between International business Machines and Microsoft Corporation

Re:Joint IBM Microsoft Agreement ..

[itsdapead]

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!

Re:Joint IBM Microsoft Agreement ..

[Anonymous Coward]

> whoever put that line in the contract had foreseen the clone market.

Q/SCP/MS-DOS ran on many different architectures of 8086/8088 computers other than that of the IBM PC. SCP's own Zebra range were S100 based and had serial terminals. This was similar to CP/M (of which QDOS was a clone) which also ran on the Z80 based Zebras as well as many different forms of 8080/Z80 machines.

There was no need for a 'clone market' for MS to sell MS-DOS to other OEMs. What made clones necessary was Lotus 123 which did direct screen writes to CGI or Hercules video adaptors and thus wouldn't work if it wasn't an IBM PC or clone. It wasn't until MS-DOS 5 that a clone was needed to run MS-DOS. Prior to that it could still be made to run on many different machine types.

Dartmouth College, not University, thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

EOM

In its day ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... BASIC was the Esperanto of computer languages. Today, BASIC is the Esperanto of computer languages.

Lies, all lies.

[westlake]

It's well-documented that Billy Gates' success is largely due to having rich and well-connected parents.

Gates was selling microcomputer BASIC to the Fortune 500 in 1975. MBASIC was the first product for the micro to reach the top tier in software sales for all computer platforms.

It took Microsoft less than five years to develop a full suite of mature and highly regarded programming languages for CP/M. The gold standard for operating systems in the eight-bit era.

In the late seventies, Microsoft was superbly positioned for a move into operating systems and had licensed UNIX from AT&T.

In the right hands, 16 bit CP/M or a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone could be a right profitable little goldmine. But Gates had something much bigger in mind when Digital Research fumbled the ball:

Non-exclusive licensing at a mass market price of $50 retail list. The MS-DOS PC was a viable commercial product before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.

Re:Lies, all lies.

[rtb61]

Cough, cough, IBM did the work, M$ just ran off with the benefits due to a very, very shonky contract. IBM could have still wiped M$ out if they had not been stupidly greedy when they released their own much better OS. Lotus blew it by not reducing prices to compete, same with Word Perfect. Xerox also gave away ideas for free. So rather than M$ success it was others failures. So luck and yeah corruption with regard to corporate lawyers had a lot to do with.

Re:Lies, all lies.

[tlhIngan]

Cough, cough, IBM did the work, M$ just ran off with the benefits due to a very, very shonky contract.

At the time, the IBM PC project was a lightly funded "get it out there quick" project. This was IBM using an off-the-shelf processor and common every day parts to make their PC, after all. This WAS IBM, and generally NIH was verboten. But IBM needed a PC quick and cheap.

The only bit that was truly IBM's was the BIOS, and IBM figured that since DOS was tied heavily to the BIOS that no one would clone it, so Microsoft retaining the rights wouldn't mean that much since every sale of MS-DOS was for an IBM PC.

Oh Puh-lease!

[lophophore]

If it had not been a GE machine at Dartmouth, it would have been something else that Kemeny and Kurtz wrote BASIC on.

What utter claptrap. Ridiculous.

You know nothing at all, not a thing.

[westlake]

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.

1975

MITS Altair BASIC

Revenues $16,000

1976

Microsoft refines and enhances BASIC to sell to other customers including General Electric, NCR, and Citibank.

1977

Microsoft FORTRAN

1978

Applesoft BASIC, Microsoft COLBOL-80

1979

Microsoft 8080 BASIC is the first microprocessor product to win the ICP Million Dollar Award. Traditionally dominated by software for mainframe computers, this recognition is indicative of the growth and acceptance of the PC industry.

MBASIC for the 8086

1980

Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard. CP/M plug-n card for the Apple II.

Microsoft 16 bit XENIX OS (licensed from AT&T) and a full suite of 16 bit *NIX programming languages.

Microsoft PASCAL

Revenues $7,520,000. ($21,273,620, adjusted for inflation) Microsoft Timeline

CP/M-86 was in development hell.

Gates promised delivery of a marketable 16 bit CP/M clone in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC --- at an unprecedented mass market price of $50 retail list in return for a non-exclusive license.

80% off the proposed list price for CP/M-86.

The entire point of the business, btw, was to isolate the IBM development team from the IBM PC hierarchy.

I very much doubt the PC development team ever gave the slightest thought to Gate's mother. They were looking for lean and hungry outsiders, ready and willing to move.

But Billl Gates and Microsoft were not the unknowns that myth made them, even then.

Do we all owe the janitor credit, too?

[msobkow]

Were it not for the janitor removing the old papers from his garbage can, his cube/office would have been inundated shortly, causing the whole project to fail. I guess we should credit that janitor with creating a computer revolution, too.

Seriously. The guy was one engineer on a computer system and not part of the BASIC team. How the HELL does anyone conclude from that that we "owe him" credit for anything except participating in the design of an obsolete piece of hardware?

Re:Do we all owe the janitor credit, too?

[ebvwfbw]

It's really the other way around. Steven Spielberg owes the computing community for his career. He's stood on the shoulder of the giants that came up with graphics processing for his movies, and clearly Unix had a great deal to do with that.

Basic was just a little teaching language for simple purposes. It also taught a lot of bad habits.

So we can blame him...

[kmoser]

I blame him for all the resulting spaghetti code.

Re:Passed on wealth--WORKS

[Allegrippus]

Well, in the mid-1960's one of those GE-225 systems that his dad designed found its way to my local school district here in little ol' Altoona, PA. From my first programs in 1967 (junior high, a rare opportunity at that time!), I was able to study programming during three years of high school, move on to get my CompSci degree, and then find decent work. Since those early GE days I've worked with Honeywell, DEC, IBM mainframe, PC's and client/server, web apps, and most recently -- cloud and managed services. I never became rich, but when I retired last year I had 40 years of working at something I enjoyed, and figure I could have been much poorer without people like Spielberg's dad, the staff at Dartmouth, and some kindly, unknown folks at GE and IBM who often shipped me large packets of manuals just for the asking. It seems to me that nothing much gets done without somebody initially having capital -- other than the poorer getting REALLY poorer.