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

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

[tomhath]

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

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

[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:Responsible for Apple and Microsoft both?

[Stormwatch]

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

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

[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.

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.