anonymous161 said:
At which point Steve will install Nanosaur II on Bush II's Powerbook and the Chief Executive will be lost in Dino-land for the remainder of his term.
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I just missed Bill Gates
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At which point Steve will install Nanosaur II on Bush II's Powerbook and the Chief Executive will be lost in Dino-land for the remainder of his term.
anonymous161 said:
Our freedom from reality distortion ???
Isn't reality distortion the Bush administrations main tool - like their flux capacitor ?
Lord Blackadder said:
Not sure what those savvy business moves were exactly. He had nothing to do with the creation of the PC or even more importantly, PC clones. He basically had a monopoly fall into his lap.
watcher2001 said:
I honestly thought somebody would take offense to my reload remark and was surprised when nobody did.
IJ Reilly said:
No one has a monopoly fall into thier laps. That's a ridiculous comment. He did make very tactful and savvy business deals. Tricking IBM into believeing MS had DOS when they didn't, licensing DOS, etc. Most people would have just sold it to IBM, but he saw the bigger picture.
IJ Reilly said:
Any business manuvers that make you the world's richest man is savvy in my book. So whatever he did to get where he is was savvy. Savvy. Now I said it too much. Savvy. Kemosabe. You sabe?
anonymous161 said:
No political comment, but
Waste of smilies: number one sign of a useless post. Acht. Oh well.
Jobs/Clinton '08, anyone? "Putting the country under our RDF"
Press Release: "The US Government reccomends everyone purchase Apple computers to protect against the rising instances of hijackings of Windows AI (Version 7.0, SP10) and the inherent increase in circumstances of computers taking over the house in which they are installed"
OnceUGoMac said:
He didn't "trick" IBM. I don't know where you got that idea. I also don't know where you get the idea about this "bigger picture" that he supposed saw, since that "bigger picture" didn't even exist, and it never would have existed but for the efforts of Compaq. In fact in some ways, Compaq is more responsible for Bill billions than Bill is.
IJ Reilly said:
You know, you always seem the need to argue with every point even if it's fact.
Fact #1: Bill Gates met with IBM and offered them a Disk Operating System (DOS).
Fact #2: The problem is, MS didn't have DOS. He lied.
Fact #3: Per usual business practice, IBM offered to buy DOS from MS (remember, MS didn't have it). However, Bill convinced IBM to license it from MS, because "all the profits come from hardware, anyways".
If you don't call that savvy and a mighty good trick, then I don't know what you call it. So, that's where I get the idea. Also, the bigger picture is licensing software. Had Bill just sold it to IBM, MS wouldn't be the giant that it is.
I guess you going to attempt to argue that Wikipedia is incorrect. Go ahead, try me.link
And another link for you to argue about
Savvy is good way to describe it, as well as lucky. Now I'm not trying to disagree with you because that was a brilliant move by Gates but it took a lot of luck for IBM to respond the way they did also.OnceUGoMac said:
Josh396 said:
You're right. Luck was on his side. As was Apple when HP turned down Wozniak's computer. It's a matter of exploiting that luck as well.
OnceUGoMac said:
You need only read the very articles you cited to see how incorrect this is. Gates never said he "had DOS." In fact IBM didn't want a thing called DOS (which didn't even exist), but CP/M. IBM didn't so much license DOS from Microsoft as Microsoft retained the right to sell it independently. Nobody had any reason to think this was very important -- Bill Gates included -- because at that time nobody else but IBM could build a machine to run it. Cloning came afterwards, and not because IBM wanted it (very much to the contrary), or because Bill Gates willed it into existence. It happened because Compaq figured out how to do it.
I have all the important books on Gates and Microsoft on my bookshelf. Trust me, I've read them.
Let's not forget the part where Gates, realizing he could not create an OS quickly enough for IBM, sent them to Gary Kildall of Digital Research. DR had CP/M already... but Kildall blew off IBM*. By the time IBM went BACK to Gates, he'd bought DOS from Tim Paterson.
* Or whatever. The end result was that DR did not do business with IBM.
* Or whatever. The end result was that DR did not do business with IBM.
Josh396 said:
Gates has never been one to let an opportunity slip through his fingers. He was like that from the very start, which is why he had the nerve to tell IBM that his company could produce an OS for their new computer when they'd never done anything like it before. It could not have hurt that he had family connections with IBM, that probably helped convince them that he could be trusted with the work.
Without a doubt, Gates has good business instincts. But the fact is, a lot of people have good business instincts -- and they aren't all multibillionaires. I can cite several major instances in the Microsoft story where it could all have come crashing down, but didn't for reasons pretty much out of the company's control. Luck was their constant companion during the early years. And in the end, it's always better to be lucky than to be good.
clayj said:
From the start, IBM envisioned their PC running CP/M, but they needed a 16-bit version, which Digital Research did not have yet and didn't feel they could produce in the short time IBM wanted it. After talks between IBM and DR broke down, IBM went back to Microsoft. Gates wasn't even sure they should commit to the project until they'd secured QDOS (a 16-bit CP/M clone) from Seattle Computer. QDOS was not PC-DOS with a different name, as some think, but buying it saved them a lot of time in developing PC-DOS.
clayj said:
quoting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout
Breakout, a discrete logic (non-microprocessor) game, was developed by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, while he was employed by Hewlett-Packard.
Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs worked at Atari, and he enlisted Wozniak to design the game, which he did in four days. Jobs took credit for the work and reportedly earned US$5000, but paid Wozniak only $350, which he said was half.
I've seen docos where Nolan Bushnell talks about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Breakout. Your link is to the Atari 2600 while Woz made the coin op version.
IJ Reilly said:
He wrote some of the best basic interpreters of the 80's...
Plus his last contribution to the programming world seems to be bannana.bas, a personnal favorite of mine ;p
Palad1 said:
Not familiar with this. What is it?
Microsoft did produce a number of interpreters during the '70s and '80s, but the last one Bill Gates actually had a had in coding (AFAIK) was the BASIC interpreter for the Altair (the first one they did), along with Paul Allen, who some think did most of the heavy lifting.