Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 09:02:34 -0700 From: Slim <jallen@aviating.com> To: Kevin Golding <kevin@caomhin.demon.co.uk> Cc: Dan Look <dan@electriccheese.com>, ITServices@cableinet.co.uk, Conrad Sabatier <conrads@home.com>, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG, joel2a@yahoo.com Subject: Re: Microsoft bashers Message-ID: <3B891D9A.13E42204@aviating.com> References: <4.2.2.20010803221311.00cb62e0@mail.intwebservices.com> <054111029231981PCOW024M@blueyonder.co.uk> <01082601582601.00417@wolverine.pandora.be> <ARB03pBMJNi7Ew1y@caomhin.demon.co.uk>
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There's no point, nothing to be gained, by bashing anybody who contributed to the buildup of the computer business to where it is today. In 1970, there were no computers available for personal use, except on an extremely limited scale, guys getting used micro computers being upgraded to main frames mostly. The relatively small part of the population who had ever seen a computer in real life had no dream of ever actually owning one themselves. I certainly did not. Then the Intel chips started appearing. We bought these small one board devices with 1K of memory and no I/O other than a hex keyboard and 8 segment tubes, and wrote programs in 1s and 0s, because there were no assemblers. Oh, you could write in the chip's command set and assemble it by hand if you wanted, or just eliminate the middle step. This was in the mid-70's. BYTE Magazine made it's appearance about this time. I bought an Apple IIp in about 1976 or 77, with 16K of memory, cassette tape I/O and a RF converter to use a TV set for a screen. It came with a BASIC interpreter built in, and a game on cassette called "Little Brickout". That was all the software there was. I think it cost about $1,500 at a time when you could buy a new Volvo for about $4,500! A few years later, I was able to buy a newly introduced 5.25 floppy, for about $1400, IIRC. No hard drives at this point. There were enthusiasts all over the country, spending their evenings in their workshops and back bedrooms tinkering, trying to figure out how to make something useful out of these little devices. This fellow in Albuquerque was selling micro-processors in kit form which could be built into a real working computer, the Altair, and another outfit was selling Imsai's, with lights and switches covering the front panel for I/O. Apples were the slickest, and came ready to use right out of the box... but for what? There were no I/O devices except cassette tapes, and paper tape, so the first order of business was to write some code to load a paper tape loader. You flipped switches to input that program byte by byte until you had it all in memory, then hit the "Run" switch. If you had miss flipped one switch, it crashed and you had to do it all over again. The hero at the computer society back then was a guy who came up with a paper tape loader that only took 28 bytes down from about 60. Much less switch flipping! The first hackers! With an Apple, you eliminated all that, BTW. I still have around here somewhere the patent application which told how to take an ordinary IBM Selectric typewriter and rig it up for use as a printer. You guys would fall down laughing to see what a kluge this was, but there was almost nothing else, and Selectrics were plentiful, if not cheap. I think they weighed over a hundred pounds, too. Some of the more active creative types gradually figured out how to make some money from their avocation, supplying parts and supplies and machines and know-how to the rest of us. Some hung on and eventually made good money, others came and went. There was an amazing mix of people involved, barely teens to BHOF's, all brought together by a shared enthusiasm to innovate, learn, create and make something of these wonderful new devices. This was an evolutionary process, maybe even a series of closely spaced mini revolutionary processes happening asynchronously and very disorderly. There wasn't much practical use for these things in the early days. No database managers, no spread sheets, no accounting, no Wizard and Princess, no nothing. The first software packages were dreadful, exceeded in their complexity only by their uselessness. The term "user friendly" was unheard of, and unpracticed. Documentation was pathetic, setting the standard which persists to this day. Things started to really get in gear when the guy came up with VisiCalc. This was a real revolution, the first mass software to make a real impact. Things were different after Visicalc than they were before... much different. Now you could actually DO something useful with your computer without being a white coated computerwizard. Accountants, real estate investors, stock brokers, gas station owners, etc. started to acquire Apple II's like crazy. A few stories in the Wall Street Journal and such like places, and pretty soon there began to be rumors that IBM was coming up with a micro-processor. The term "Personal Computer" or PC was first introduced after a vigorous debate about what to call these things, since "micro-processor" seemed so clumsy and unmarketable. While all this was going on, and fermenting, there were these two snot-nosed punks, one of whom had written a BASIC interpreter, but they didn't have a machine to try it on. They wrote it solely from the chip manual, the Intel 8080 chip, I believe it was. They called this guy at Altair in Albuquerque and asked if they could come down and try it. They could, he said, they did and it ran the first time..... no debugging required. Those two were Bill Gates and Paul Allen. I still laugh every time I think of this Senior VP at IBM who made the decision whether to exercise IBM's option to acquire all rights to the MS-DOS operating system for $100,000, and who decided that $100,000 was an awful lot of money to be paying these teenagers! The Bill Buckner of computing!!! We ought to be g**d**** glad he didn't pay. The purpose of all this is not so much to defend Gates and Allen, but rather to make the point that there is no place, no call, for bashing of anyone, especially by guys who have accomplished next to nothing in advancing the state of computing. It is simply inappropriate, and frankly seems to be used mostly to build up the basher's ego by belittling the bashee. We have reached the point where we are by the efforts, and intelligence, and creativity, and more than a few missteps, of all of us, some more so than others. It's not nice, and it makes the basher look stupid to those of us with a longer horizon. If there is any bashing that needs to be done, it would be most appropriately done by the people who have accomplished the great things, the Gate's, Allens, Jobs and Wozniaks, those software guys, the guys who thought up, perfected and popularized the internet. If you are not among them, maybe you ought to keep your mouth shut until you are. Quitcherbitchin, and be glad these genius's have provided you with such delightful devices to play with, and probably more than a few jobs (employment, not Steve). Slim Kevin Golding wrote: > > In message <01082601582601.00417@wolverine.pandora.be>, Dan Look > <dan@electriccheese.com> writes > >The first GUI's were developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) (or > >so I've allways been told). And then first brought to public attention by Apple > >(mostly). > > > >I guess the early internet/arpanet ran mostly on Unix but I beleive TCP/IP was > >developed with cross platform compatability specifically in mind. > > > >And yes it's true, up untill around '95 MS had little or no interest in the > >'net. > > Not even then really, they wanted to go the AOL/Compuserve route and > offer a proprietary network, it was only after MSN flopped that it > became more of a true ISP. > > However it isn't completely outrageous to suggest that some of these > things would be as big or popular. Whether we like it or not MS have > actually done quite a bit for computer evangelism, and that's a good > term for it. Think of Bill as one of those dodgy TV[1] evangelists, > sure, it's good that he gets people seeing the appeal of things, it's > just a shame he's too busy lining his pockets. > > Anyway, today's embrace and extend URI is.... > http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/ce/tools/source/license.asp > > Kevin > > [1] as in Television okay! :-) > > >> On 25 Aug 01, at 15:03, Conrad Sabatier wrote: > >> > >> > > >> > On 04-Aug-2001 joel2a@yahoo.com wrote: > >> > > Well I just have to say that if there wasn't Windows we would all be > >> > > back the days of console prompt typing and there certainly would not be > >> > > as many people on the internet. > >> > > >> > Anyone who begins a post with a statement as absurdly ridiculous as this > >> > deserves only one of two things (or both): to be ignored or killfiled. > >> > > >> > >> Joel, if history wasn't the way it is, it would be different. That does > >> not preclude development of the internet nor something like > >> Windows but different. And the internet started as Unix, IIRC. > >> Until recently Bill Gates was on public record as saying that the > >> internet was not going to be important ... even the devil can be > >> wrong ;-)) And I do believe that GUIs were invented elsewhere and > >> Microsoft copied and <gasp of disbelief> even purloined some of > >> the code. Though I stand to be corrected about that. > > -- > kevin@caomhin.demon.co.uk > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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