"Tony Stark was able to build [a miniaturized arc reactor] in a CAVE! With a box of scraps!"
I'm sorry, sir. I'm not Tony Stark.
“I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
51–60 of 119 posts
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#52Gates 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 .
Thank you for the link. I didn't know Jobs and Gates where fighting IBM together back then.
TLDR : Bill gates is a Hoss.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#53Gates 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 .
Watching them so young is such a trip! Thanks for the link!
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#54I had a manager that would repeatedly use this type of remark. We had this particular application that on one could touch without breaking something. It was always a mess. He would often remark "I wrote the whole thing over a weekend, why can't you guys make a tiny little change without breaking it?" One day I finally got fed up with him and replied "Because it's the quality of work you'd expect from an entire applic…
Odds are Gates didn't write the complete code, probably more of the blueprint. Also worth noting- the original implementation of FAT was pretty basic/fundamental. Could one even call it an application?
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#55So that's why everyone uses NTFS...
FAT8 was written in 1977. Nobody is using any filesystem written in 1977 these days.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#56When he says "He wrote FAT on an airplane" he means with pencil and paper since FAT is so old that there were no laptops to do that on. Which maybe he figured out all of the specs, but he didn't put code down and debug it. Of course in those days writing it on paper was quite common before people typed it into the computer. And that is quite impressive in and of itself. Most of the time people treated that activity as if they were coding so they were very precise. Now a days we're fast, but we aren't as precise.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#57If he'd kept one foot in the codebase - he might not have made so much money - but his software legacy might have turned out differently.
I'm not sure that Microsoft's is a bad legacy. They did a whole hell of a lot to put programming and office tools in the hands of normal people.
I agree. Regardless of what they've done, they largely accomplished their vision. Their vision was to put a PC in every home. They started with such a lofty goal and delivered. The first thing I ever learned on a pc was typing a: to load a floppy on MS DOS.
It seems this is largely their problem today - they no longer have a lofty goal to focus their energy on. Most companies have one. Google - organize the world's information etc. etc.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#58So that's why everyone uses NTFS...
EXT4 fs and other fs , NTFS is a little pony if you go to servers world
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#59I'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 used to fill spiral notebooks with code back in the 70's. This was back when I'd have to go to the "computer center" to use the actual computer.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#60And they got a patent for it? :D
He was talking about FAT8 not FAT32.