61–70 of 101 posts
The persistent rumors about billg ripping BASIC from a DECUS distribution seem to have finally died down.
You mean this one? https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/
I seriously doubt you'd find any copyrighted commonality in the implementation.
Bill Gates is succesful, kind and generous. He never finished college, he reads books and writes about them on a blog. He is that rare combination of super smart and benevolent at the time. Trustworthy. Just read his best friend Paul Allen's book. He has given away increments of the fortune that he earned through honest, legal business practices. DOJ dropped their case against Microsoft because Microsoft was innocent…
Wow: > On July 6, 1994 Kildall, 52, walked into a Monterey bar. He was wearing motorcycle leathers with Harley-Davidson patches;a would-be biker. There were some real bikers in the bar. Something was said. There was pushing and shoving, and Kildall died from injuries sustained to his head. An inquest called the death “suspicious,” but no one was charged.
That's interesting to me, because when I was in grade school, they were pushing Logo, and I didn't like it at all. It wasn't presented as doing much more than ordering a turtle around though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with that metaphor is it implies 100% of microsoft's profits only exist because of theft. Their software added legitimate value to people's lives. It still does - Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do. DirectX pushed the stagnant OpenGL to innovate. Visual studio is fantastic (miles better than current XCode). C# is a worthy successor to Java. VS Code is excellent too. And so is…
> Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do OK, now I know you're kidding.
Bill Gates is succesful, kind and generous. He never finished college, he reads books and writes about them on a blog. He is that rare combination of super smart and benevolent at the time. Trustworthy. Just read his best friend Paul Allen's book. He has given away increments of the fortune that he earned through honest, legal business practices. DOJ dropped their case against Microsoft because Microsoft was innocent…
Never forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes#Mic...
Microsoft is hiring!
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120311005018/http://www.seattl...
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/01/business/compressed-data-...
You might also find 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' interesting. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
The thing about EE&E is that it's not exclusively a Microsoft strategy. Anyone who develops a popular extension to a standardized format is inherently putting the standard at risk until and unless competing implementations "catch up" and those extensions are adopted back into the standard. Hell, this is what caused the UNIX Wars, and even GNU is guilty of EE&E on the C standard - try compiling the Linux kernel with a…
That's not exclusive, but they pretty much coined the term and made it in a viable business practice to undermine competition in the most dirty way.
The persistent rumors about billg ripping BASIC from a DECUS distribution seem to have finally died down.
> The timing of Gates's leave [from Harvard] could appear suspect since it came on the heels of a disciplinary hearing with college administrators. An auditor from the Defense Department discovered how much time Gates had spent programming on the PDP-10 computer, which was provided by the U.S. government, and began to ask questions. Gates's explanations were flimsy: first, he was doing work for his own company, and, second, some of that outside work was carried out by Allen, who wasn't a student. The records of the Gates disciplinary hearing are sealed, but accounts say that the punishment fell short of his being asked to leave… Gates, who as nineteen years old at the time, made his case in the club's newsletter, which published his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in the January-February 1976 issue… Furthermore, there was the computer time, whose "value" exceeded $40,000, Gates informed the hobbyists. This odd phrasing jumped out to some readers, even before people learned of Gates's reliance on Harvard's computers. Gates wasn't claiming that Micro-Soft had spent $40,000 for the computer time, which it needed to recoup; rather, it had obtained that time somehow. Young Gates certainly had chutzpah. He was writing to a bunch of excited young computer enthusiasts to object to the "theft" of a version of a program [BASIC] that was, to start, based on software created by academic researchers working on a federal grant and was created using "borrowed" time on a university computer that was also paid for by the federal government.
p. 73
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing about EE&E is that it's not exclusively a Microsoft strategy. Anyone who develops a popular extension to a standardized format is inherently putting the standard at risk until and unless competing implementations "catch up" and those extensions are adopted back into the standard. Hell, this is what caused the UNIX Wars, and even GNU is guilty of EE&E on the C standard - try compiling the Linux kernel with a…
> The thing about EE&E is that it's not exclusively a Microsoft strategy. That's not exclusive, but they pretty much coined the term and made it in a viable business practice to undermine competition in the most dirty way.
No, that predates Microsoft by well over a hundred years in the corporate sphere just in the US. They're not remotely close to being the dirtiest at it historically.
If anyone doesn't understand that, go read the history of Standard Oil, US Steel, GM & Ford, or a dozen other giants that have ruled the US economic landscape at one time or another. Walmart has competed as dirty as anything Microsoft has ever done, the same goes for Amazon, Google and Facebook more recently.
It would be more accurate to say DOS is an overlay on Windows 95, once Windows 95 has booted. The DOS façade may be so convincing that the OS seems to be running on DOS, but that's the exact opposite of the truth: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
Microsoft could have let people install DR-DOS on Windows 95; DR-DOS is similar enough to MS DOS for the magic to work. But it would have sucked for the end user if they had to buy a second OS to use old apps and drivers, and it's hard to say what the user would gain. The fancy multi-tasking features of DR-DOS presumably wouldn't work while Windows was running, for example.
Worth watching if you have 20 minutes.