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2006-06-22 -Short Attention Span Theater-

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Posted by anonymous2u 2006-06-22 00:00|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 What's really rich is that Bill Gates appears to be known as a kind man, despite his robber baron rise. I suppose history remembers cruel men like Rockefeller and Carnegie the same way. A lifetime of cruelty followed by giving away some of your money to charity is evidently the #1 method of ensuring your legacy. If Bill Gates didn't exist, personal computing would be 5-10 years ahead of where it is today.

Posted by gromky 2006-06-22 03:14|| 2006-06-22 03:14|| Front Page Top

#2 We'd be using stylish iMACs running OS 8.2.

Posted by 6 2006-06-22 04:19|| 2006-06-22 04:19|| Front Page Top

#3 Good article. I can and have bashed Gates with the best of them, as I worked with PCs from the very begining. I bought one. Standard configuration 64K (it might have been less, cos I vaguely recall DOS does run in 64K), not enough to run DOS. A floppy disk drive was an optional extra and hard drives were years in the future.

But what the PC did was sweep away the dozens of vendors all selling their own OS variant of Unix, CPM, MPM that only ran on their proprietary hardware.

MS under Gates was ruthless, but our hostility to them was in hindsight hostility toward the winner.

And Gates should be applauded for what he is doing. He may even shake up the notoriously unaccountable NGO system.

Posted by phil_b">phil_b 2006-06-22 05:40|| http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/]">[http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/] 2006-06-22 05:40|| Front Page Top

#4 agree with gromky. Robber baron makes it big, thinks of himself as a special god and throws beads while giving shots of whiskey.

Sure, the computer is great. So is the assembly line.

Posted by 2b 2006-06-22 06:59|| 2006-06-22 06:59|| Front Page Top

#5 MS-DOS was a total piece of crap, other companies offered better alternatives.

IBM deserves the credit for cloned hardware and the PC explosion. I stand by my statements that Bill Gates is a cruel robber baron and that his company's technology is poor.

Posted by gromky 2006-06-22 08:38|| 2006-06-22 08:38|| Front Page Top

#6 Gromky, bet you use Beta, too. ;^)

Could you please explain while all those "better" alternatives didn't win?

Oh, I've been in the business for near 30 years and also saw all the mini wars up close and personal, too.

Posted by AlanC">AlanC 2006-06-22 09:05|| 2006-06-22 09:05|| Front Page Top

#7 But what the PC did was sweep away the dozens of vendors all selling their own OS variant of Unix, CPM, MPM that only ran on their proprietary hardware.

That would come as news to Gary Kildall. What Gates did was to protect the jobs of the IT priesthood for a 30 years.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-06-22 09:12|| 2006-06-22 09:12|| Front Page Top

#8 I too have attached Gates. And I have also used PCs from the first.

I think he should be applauded for what he is doing now. Its very commendable that he is now supporting causes like he is.

But Microsoft didn't get their market position by building a better product but by marketing - and forcing manufacturers to install their OS or face a much higher per-seat price. Even IBM which had OS/2 (also much better then Windows 3.x IMHO) was forced to install Windows and only sell OS/2 as an add-on.

Its the VHS vs Betamax all over again. What comes out on top isn't always the best.

Posted by CrazyFool 2006-06-22 09:13|| 2006-06-22 09:13|| Front Page Top

#9
I've long held the opinion that the bad DOS format was ultimately IBM's fault.

Back in the day, IBM made its money selling you a warehouse full of mainframe computers and renting you a fleet of folks in white lab coats to run them. When the issue of personal computing started coming up, the suits at IBM decided they had to at least *look* like they were trying to put out a PC product.

So they deliberately chose the underpowered, clumsy, inadequate OS offered by the ugly geek in the glasses, with the plan being that the product would fail and fail spectacularly, and they'd plausibly be able to say to the corporate buyers and shareholders: "Look, we're IBM. The biggest computer company in the world. We tried this 'personal computing' thing, it was a miserable failure, consumers hate it, it will never fly and now we'll sell you another mainframe, a gross of giant magnetic tape spools, and a dozen men in lab coats."

You'll recall they thought so little of Gates' OS that they failed to lock up exclusive rights to the technology. And that was the crack in the dyke that Gates used to flood the world with his products. Flawed as it was, his OS was good enough for Big Blue, and every other manufacturer could suddenly compete on equal terms. IBM almost went under for their lack of foresight and understanding of what consumers wanted.

Posted by Seafarious">Seafarious 2006-06-22 09:19|| 2006-06-22 09:19|| Front Page Top

#10 I too have attacked Gates.....

Geeze... need more coffee....

And the PC was invented by IBM - not Microsoft. Microsoft only provided the OS (which ran on propritary hardware which just happened to become a standard because of the 'IBM' name on it). And I've heard that when Gates signed the deal with IBM he didn't even own the rights to DOS (Seattle Computer did) but had to buy it (some say IBM had to buy it for him...) at some bargain-basement price.

And didn't IBM go to Microsoft only because Digital Research snubbed them on CP/M?

Posted by CrazyFool 2006-06-22 09:21|| 2006-06-22 09:21|| Front Page Top

#11 Gates may be the world's richest human being, but even he can't stop The Dawn of the Dead.

Posted by badanov 2006-06-22 09:50|| http://www.freefirezone.org]">[http://www.freefirezone.org] 2006-06-22 09:50|| Front Page Top

#12 Actually, when the pc started IBM had a much better OS for it developed by a few researcher in the company but they refused to let that software leave the company. I saw that product once. Really nice. (A friend knew the developers). Lightyears ahead of DOS and IBM could have made it free - problem was the Suites got into wars with each other on pricing it. Some still wanted it taken to the insane point IBM had in their mainframes where each operation was a separate charge (You want to multiply? That's another $1000/mo). The result of the pricing fight was a stalemate. That's how DOS got a niche.
Oh and DOS 1.0 was not written by Gates. It was another company he purchased when his father told him about the niche in IBM. He sold it before buying Seattle Software that had the actual product. DOS 2.0 was a complete rewrite with his own people.

BTW.. I saw a totally differnet attack on Gates the other day. Somebody wanted to put a Rubin's painting on the cover of their SciFi Novel. Seems that Bill has bought up huge amounts of the world's art and wants amazing fees for using it on book covers and such. To thumb their noses at his prices they hired an artist to do a satire of the piece and put the satire on the cover.

Posted by 3dc 2006-06-22 10:34|| 2006-06-22 10:34|| Front Page Top

#13 crack in the dyke

Sea - I honestly believe you meant "crack in the dike". :)

Posted by GORT 2006-06-22 10:42|| 2006-06-22 10:42|| Front Page Top

#14 Seems that Bill has bought up huge amounts of the world's art and wants amazing fees for using it on book covers and such.

:>
And here you are an olde hand. Is this the Bill Gates owns the Vatican collection story?

Posted by 6 2006-06-22 15:41|| 2006-06-22 15:41|| Front Page Top

#15 I'd give him credit for being willing to evaluate his motives and adapt his focus. A Christian leadership training group got together with 100 of America's top leaders in various areas and trained them in biblical principles that when applied, result in even greater blessing for the greater good for all, kind of like the trickle-down theory of economics. One of the key Scriptures from the seminar was paraphrased by Gates at the press announcement: "To whom much is given, much is required." Proportionate responsibility accompanies great wealth and recognizing we are to use the gifts God gave us for the greater good, rather than for selfish and greedy gain, is key to transforming society. God's blessing is ultimately necessary for success in the first place, and he wasn't dishonest or criminal about obtaining his wealth. I think the difference in British, and European thought, is our educational system that encourages thinking outside-the-box rather than accept indoctrination. It's kind of humorous to have Gates buying up the olde art from the olde farts, in a classic American way the rest of the world doesn't quite understand. I'm glad to see such a good article from the other side of the pond.

Posted by Danielle 2006-06-22 16:51|| 2006-06-22 16:51|| Front Page Top

#16 #1 What's really rich is that Bill Gates appears to be known as a kind man, despite his robber baron rise. I suppose history remembers cruel men like Rockefeller and Carnegie the same way. A lifetime of cruelty (creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs is cruel? )followed by giving away some of your money to charity is evidently the #1 method of ensuring your legacy. If Bill Gates didn't exist, personal computing would be 5-10 years ahead of where it is today. Posted by gromky 2006-06-22 03:14|| Front Page|| ||Comments Top

What an off-target load, technology could hardly be moving faster. Difficult enuf to keep up with now. If Gates "didn't exist" someone else would have wandered along. Gates is a rain maker! Unlike these wonks in Washington, a Job creator! Give him the credit he deserves.

Posted by Besoeker 2006-06-22 17:13|| 2006-06-22 17:13|| Front Page Top

#17 *shakes head* I've worked with both MS-DOS And CP/M at the programming level: Both were equivalent in capability and ease-of-use.

I agree that innovation was held back 10 to 15 years by Gates, but NOT because of his operating system, his marketing techniques, or his hard-sell tactics. He was the idiot who recommended to IBM that they use the Intel 8086 chip instead of the Motorola 68000 for the IBM PC.

The justification was based on programming philosophy: The IBM mainframes of the day used a segmented architecture in which you had to load registers to point to 4K byte segments, and your instructions would contain offsets that would specify the specific byte within that segment of memory. The Intel 8086 used the same idea, so Gates figured IBM could leverage their programming expertise with segmented memory to program it, and they bit. Hard. The result was a plethora of "memory models" that C programmers had to wrestle with for years, and which really held back the use of memory above the notorious 1 Megabyte limit (extended memory).

In contrast, All the really innovative OS'es, such as the Mac OS and the Amiga OS, were programmed using the 68000, which viewed memory as a single huge contiguous block of bytes unmediated by segment registers. This freed up registers to use for REAL work. They also had better addressing modes. This was the memory framework assumed by Unix, and the tools were far easier to write and use.

Intel eventually expanded their segment address registers and other addressing modes to 32 bits with the 80286, but botched the design up by using a register bit to maintain 8086 compatibility to satisfy Microsoft and IBM: they had an instruction to set the bit to transition to 32 bit mode, but failed to provide an instruction to transition back to 16 bit mode to leverage existing device drivers (my recollection is that they had to get the KEYBOARD to fire an interrpt to reset the CPU to 16 bit mode. Idiocy. sheer Idiocy). That got corrected in the 80386, just in time for Windows 3.0 and true 32 bit mode.

And guess how the Intel chips from the 80386 onward are programmed? they set ALL the segment registers to 0 and use the memory as a Single. Huge. contiguous. Block. of. Memory.

Some small decisions create a lot of grief later on. THIS was one of them!

Posted by Ptah">Ptah 2006-06-22 20:09|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2006-06-22 20:09|| Front Page Top

#18 Yep, right on the keyboard, the infamous A20 gate.

Only, that is why for so long you had to have a keyboard hooked up or the machine wouldn't post/boot. They figured the keyboard would be around for a long time so they jacked it for compatibilty.

A lot of BIOSes wouldn't post if the keyboard wasn't there.

Posted by bombay">bombay 2006-06-22 22:00|| 2006-06-22 22:00|| Front Page Top

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