31–40 of 119 posts
I guess it's no wonder why the mainstream of Apple and Microsoft is what it is.
Gates is one of those rare people who is at a time a good developer, good manager and a cunning businessman. I started to appreciate him after watching Triumph of the Nerds documentary series. I literally loled for 5 minutes after watching Gates in an event parodying IBM which was organised by Jobs http://youtu.be/riyAe4BKAng?t=20m1s .
To be honest I can't afford to commute and do nothing, I have to plan new features for my products, redesign existing ones, or at least read a tech book/article, otherwise I feel really frustrated because I dislike to stay still. The best ideas I have ever had happened during my commute, so I feel familiar with the "I wrote FAT on an airplane" statement.
"I did X in Y time so why don't you follow my lead" may have been a motivational tactic at the time, but it did backfire. I'm forced to wonder if this is how the motif began.
I'm old enough to know he didn't carry a computer on the plane....
But too young to know writing code and speccing data structures on paper (and/or napkins...) was quite common before airplane-friendly computers were available? (And for a long time after, really; ubiquitous ownership of laptops is a quite recent thing).
I'm old enough to know he didn't carry a computer on the plane....
If I remember right, he did have a Compaq "portable" he lugged around in the early portable days. Something like http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
It obviously came out after DOS / FAT.
I think the real lesson here is that every time you add a feature, you are adding development overhead to every other feature, leading to exponential development time. I'm sure if segment tuning was one of the first thing to go into windows, it would have been much simpler to implement. However, at later stages in the development you have to account for how different, already-written applications are loading their me…
I'm old enough to know he didn't carry a computer on the plane....
But too young to know writing code and speccing data structures on paper (and/or napkins...) was quite common before airplane-friendly computers were available? (And for a long time after, really; ubiquitous ownership of laptops is a quite recent thing).
"I wrote all my code on paper in hexadecimal. I couldn't afford an assembler to translate my programs into hexadecimal bytes, I did it myself. Even my BASIC interpreter is all hand written. I'd type 4K into the Apple I and ][ in about an hour. I, and many others too I think, could sit down and start typing hexadecimal in for a SMALL program to solve something that occured or something that somebody else wanted. I'd do this all the time for demos. I certainly don't remember which hexadecimal codes are which 6502 instructions any longer, but it was a part of life back then."