Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
It's well-documented that Billy Gates' success is largely due to having rich and well-connected parents.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Can we blame him for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" as well?
Circumcision is child abuse.
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...
QDOS code was copied from early versions of CPM
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.
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!
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!
Let's not forget Stacker.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
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.
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.
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"
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.
Ask Apple if just seeing a rounded corner is stealing or not.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
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]
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
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.