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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.
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...
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!
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.
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