RSSBye, Bill. A fond remembrance
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published June 27, 2008, 4:29 PM
On this final day of Bill Gates' salaried employ at the company he founded, we recall a period of history way, way back -- an era when Gates was one giant among many, and just as likely to survive the shakeout as any other.
The computing industry was built by brilliant people with colorful personalities and extraordinary talent. We have forgotten most of them. Chuck Peddle, Adam Osborne, Clive Sinclair, Federico Faggin, Les Solomon, Gary Kildall...these are among the names we knew by heart and often knew personally, for those of us who grew up with the dawn of the computing era. We knew these people often because we had met them in person -- during the first computer conferences, they were part of our second family, even if they only showed up in name only.
From that great family of pioneers, only two names remain prominent in the public conscience: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Somehow without there being a ubiquitous Internet, without Wi-Fi hot spots, without e-mail addresses, and with no IM handles or Facebook pages, we were all connected if by only a few degrees of separation. We really didn't need an Internet in the late '70s and early '80s, at least not yet. We were all on the same wavelength.
What Bill Gates has become in the minds of Americans and of citizens of the world -- number one or two on the table of rich people, the voice and principal representative of one of this country's few, unthreatened large companies -- bears only a passing resemblance to what Bill Gates meant to those of us growing up with what we originally called "microcomputers," especially to those who were very near his age. He looked, dressed, and acted like one of us, with off-the-rack shirts with wide collars and paisley patterns, unkempt hair, the occasional ketchup stain on his trousers or even his cheek, and the voice of the kid who was never quite ready to give his oral report for history class that day.
Bill Gates was not overwhelmingly smart. But he had two magnificent talents which would deliver him to the right place and the right time in history -- talents for which today he is rarely appreciated. First, he had an absolute gift for seeing patterns and perfecting them mathematically. His first great accomplishment is the very type of product for which Microsoft today is raked over the coals for its incapability to produce: interoperable computer code for a processing system across multiple microprocessors, the first interoperable BASIC language. (Perhaps Kildall was the first to seize upon this idea and market it with CP/M, but Gates was probably the first to actually accomplish the feat.)
Second, he was and is an extremely shrewd manipulator of people. For the last quarter-century and to this day, Gates is called upon to prognosticate about the future, even though his track record on this skill is actually below average. His first printing of The Road Ahead failed to integrate the Internet into his vision of the future. In fact, Gates' real skill has been to package a magnification of the present as a vision of the future -- not a direction or an evolution, but a projection of an obvious current trend into a future scenario.
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| An ad that appeared on page 7 of Creative Computing magazine, March 1981. Here you can see the Microsoft strategy in its earliest stages: 1) Associate Microsoft with the name brands everyone already uses and recognizes; 2) Sell Microsoft as an extension of that name brand into the bigger business world -- a bigger world where real work gets done. |
Here is a classic example from 24 years ago, from an article Gates wrote for the Tenth Anniversary Issue of the great magazine Creative Computing which, in the era before the Internet, represented the physical culmination of our hopes and dreams every month, by direct mail:
I call this a trend toward "softness." Today we are talking about "writable control stores" in which the microcode in a microprocessor can be changed, allowing for specialization of the instruction to gain efficiency based on the specific problem being solved.
Even in software this trend has become obvious. Rather than build up from a bare machine, a general operating system is used to allow the specialized application to be simpler. The operating system is now evolving to include graphics, as in the Microsoft Windows system; multitasking; and higher level data management functions. This even further reduces the amount of work required to specialize a machine since all of the new subroutines in the operating system are available.
This trend toward general purpose devices may seem illogical, since a specialized device can be simplified and streamlined for its particular purpose. However, the benefits of this tuning are becoming increasingly outweighed by the extremely low cost of the general purpose device which is being sold in very high volume and the design of which is receiving the very best design expertise. Both hardware and software improve greatly when volume is high and the best talent is applied.
In the future, software packages will become even more general purpose as they remember all of the user's input and mold to his profile and communication techniques. Of course, this is a form of artificial intelligence, which is a very advanced form of "softness," since it attempts to create a device so general purpose that it can deal with a vast number of inputs and recognize important patterns.
There is no particular genius in that November 1984 prognostication. Rather, there was a shrewdness and an accuracy in recognizing the key direction of evolution of an industry and capitalizing upon it, especially while most everyone else was preoccupied with the notions of miniaturization and convergence -- two "MacGuffins," to borrow a Hitchcock term, in the family plot of computer history.
I will speak for myself for a moment: Bill Gates let me down in the 1990s and early 2000s, having let his shrewdness converge with his ambition, and in the process having cast his other true talent aside. He led Microsoft in a dangerous direction that I couldn't accept, and he lost me as a follower.
But I don't believe that path cannot be corrected, and certainly I'm seeing evidence that his company is taking genuine steps to remedy the grave mistakes it made at the height of the browser wars. I will not judge Gates' entire career or his contribution to this industry, or even to the world, by this unfortunate misstep. There was a day when I, and so many others who stood with me, considered him a genuine hero -- someone who injected a much-needed dose of business sense into an industry that had many great luminaries, an overdose of visionaries, but almost no one who had a true sense of which direction was "forward."
And however the world will judge him, his and his wife's contribution to the effort to eradicate disease from Africa and from the world, makes up for any and all business injustices he may have triggered, initiated, led, or inspired in an effort to retain Microsoft's dominant position in software.
Sometimes I judge a person's true contribution to history by imagining the world without him or her. Subtract Steve Jobs from the world, and the microcomputer would have had a much tougher time finding its home in our lives...but still, I believe, it could have happened. Maybe five or ten years later, but we would have made it. Subtract Bill Gates from the world, and I sincerely believe that instead of freely using our choice of brands of computers on the worldwide Internet, you and I would be complaining openly about our monthly timesharing bill, which we would owe without fail to IBM, AT&T, DEC, Sperry, or some awful conglomeration of them all -- a much larger and more oppressive force than Microsoft ever was or could ever become.
So from one person who remembers the beginning of it all, and who stood proudly with others at the top of what was then the highest mountain...Thank you, Bill, and Godspeed.
Long Live Samna.
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|Love him, or love to hate him... the fact remains that Bill Gates will go down in the history books as the man that brought PCs into the average home. He did the same thing for the PC operating system that Henry Ford did for the automobile.
Thank you Bill.
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|Funniest thing Bill Gates ever said.
"Yeah, we stole the ph***!ng duck!"
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|oookaaay??
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|I wracked my brains trying to find a single kind thing to say about Bill Gates as a person, and when that failed I started searching the 'net..and I failed to come up with a single positive anecdote. The anti-Microsoft sentiment so common today is probably to blame for that, but still..you'd think there would be something. I suppose some of his philanthropic work is notable, though from what I've read its largely been targeted at developing markets where Microsoft wants to foster brand goodwill (hardly a practice unique to Bill's company, so I won't belabor the point). I changed tack and started thinking about some kind of true innovation to credit Bill Gates with..and I came up with something. BASIC: the language that put programming within the reach of every smart kid with a Commodore, Atari, Apple, etc. Kids didn't have the costly office machines from IBM and Compaq back then. Ironically, most "home computers" were more capable than anything IBM was putting on the desktop at the time. What Bill Gates gave to me and the other young geeks of my day was a way to do something other than play games on a computer. We could point at our little 16-bit computers-in-a-keyboard and say, "I did that! I made that sprite behave the way I wanted it to." This was a kind of nirvana that's probably difficult for modern kids to comprehend. "Object oriented everything" is the new normal. Programming has once again become what it was before BASIC - a job that people with degrees do for somebody else, on a deadline..usually with little say about what their creating. I maintained an interest in programming (mostly database-related) well into college but I never had the skills to become a "real" programmer. Nevertheless, for a few wonderful years I could copy things from books and magazines, I could learn and create, and imagine, and dream. I thank you for that, Mr. Gates. We will not forget.
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|"I suppose some of his philanthropic work is notable, though from what I've read its largely been targeted at developing markets where Microsoft wants to foster brand goodwill (hardly a practice unique to Bill's company, so I won't belabor the point)"
Dude, you're kidding. right? Browse beyond ihatebillgates.com to maybe broaden your scope of understanding a bit.
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|Perhaps the most notable thing Bill Gates has done is to rip all things Apple. Here's the proof for you M$ fanboy doubters:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GvskEGWMLp4
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MDNuq94Zg_8
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3QdGt3ix2CQ
Yes I know they're YouTube videos but that has nothing to do with the facts on the videos. These three videos which I have posted here numerous times tell you everything you need to know about where M$ got their "innovation" and "ideas" from.
Again, Apple Leads The Way. :)
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|bravo ;)
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|Agreed Bill Gates has done some wonderful things for many people. I guess people spew hate about him because they are jealous of his wealth.
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|Again, Apple Leads The Way.
*laughing*
Keep it up, man. You're killing me.
Hate to break it to you, but vendor lock-in has been around for ages...long before Apple. AT&T pioneered that one.
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|Dude, I know you are Steve Jobs gay partner. So stop barking and supporting your gay partner when he's worth nothing and neither his company. Anyway Apple sucks!! don't believe me? try this: http://www.mac-sucks.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CrQjfgvqJQ
Enjoy
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|The facepalm emote goes well here.
Absolutely unbelievable….
Apple are so creative and innovative that they wrote their own operating system..right?
Leading the way indeed… just not leading to where you think.
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|well apple does not sucks because if it wasnt because of the competition... besides Mac OS X is able to run on PCs and remember as they gain more worldwide share market crackers are gonna write malicious code for it and then they are gonna see what some of us have suffered with these ****ing viruces and yes i run mac on my toshiba laptop and windows vista and let me tell you.... windows is awesome
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|yeah mate apple leads the way to destruction =] so fuk off now troll
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|Bill is a Pioneer,
Not all pioneers are saints:)
http://www.microsoft.com...spass/exec/billg/videos/
Yet I respect the fact that he has given a lot of his money to non profit organization.
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|I think Gates did some good things and some not so good things. To me Gates was more of a business man then a great innovator. He made some very good strategic moves in his career to get where he is and for that I admire him. But, technologically speaking, it's not all that impressive.
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|To me, Bill Gates is a blessing. He helped changed the industry with the help from the government. He started a revelotion that began with the first PC back in 1980. The Apple, Commodore and Atari machines were pre 1980, more towards 1970's. We still have main frames, and they run Linux and Unix while desktops use Windows. I seen my dads computer work. Awesome. It uses a speech synthesizer that can talk back as soon as you talk to it.
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|I have found what I believe to be the most AWESOME tribute to Bill Gates. This will really make you appreciate the long legacy of Bill Gates. The second link tells you where Bill Gates got his "ideas" and inspiration from to create Windows:
http://macdailynews.com/...p/weblog/comments/17701/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvskEGWMLp4
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|Shut up man, you are making us Mac users look bad.
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|Hehe that first article is just... pathetic. I find it hard to believe even a apple user would even value it.
And as for the second.. you truely are beyond stupid. Nothing ever sinks in that skull of yours does it?
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|Dude, now am sure you are Steve Jobs gay partner. Anyway Apple sucks!! don't believe me? try this: http://www.mac-sucks.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CrQjfgvqJQ
Enjoy
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|lmao...
With fans like this...who needs enemies?
Apple lappy hardware upgrades 200% more costly than Dell equivalents
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|I started using Windows 1.0 in 1985 because the Logitech hand held scanner I purchased required running on a Windows environment. The switch from software written in Basic to Microsoft Windows was traumatic-to say the least. Over the years I have weathered the numerous error messages each version of Windows would rendered until the latest version of Windows Vista Ultimate, the 32 and 64 bit programs that Microsoft Winpanel sent to me to install and use the error reporting feature that sent to them all errors and glitches that each program produced. Not many users will agree but I think these two versions of Vista Ultimate are the best yet. I have always said Bill Gates deserves every damn dime he gets for his work. And now I know so.
Bob Hodge
Denver,CO. 80203-2527
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|Snoff, he was a good man. We'll remember him... :'(
...err, is he dead?
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|I say, the world is free at last. Gates and Jobs have been responsible for driving the IT market in a direction it should have never followed (as Arthur Clarke used to say, the future is not what it used to be). We have been living in an alternate reality for way too long.
Remember "The Man in the High Castle"?
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|In what way should it never have followed this direction?
/sensible question - am open to debate
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|LOL. Don't lump Steve Jobs in with the mess that Billy boy Gates created. Their leadership and ideology is as different as night and day.
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|Yes, please. Don't compare a crazy man (that's Jobs for you) with a ferocious businessman.
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|What reality what you like to to move to?
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|Yes, and by businessman he means crook.
Seriously, I'm going to expect a send off like this when I retire.
Thanks.
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|Bill Gates is definitely one of the greatest human being alive right now. Microsoft is a software giant and because of his company thousands and thousands of people living all around the world are getting jobs. Moreover he has donated millions and billions of $ to charities and to help poor people. Thanks Gates :)
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|"Bill Gates is definitely one of the greatest human being alive right now."
No, that praise I believe belongs to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
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|lol...FOFF man
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|Dude, I think Bill Gates has done more stuff for the world than Jobs and Woz. combined. You are such a blind apple b****.
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|"No, that praise I believe belongs to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak"
haha now your a comedian too?
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|Yeah Jobs is such a nice guy...Not!
He spent years denying that his daughter Lisa was his flesh and blood. He even denied it following a blood test that proved he was her father.
The guy was a freak and basically hasn't proven himself to be much more than that.
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|Now I know you're just as crazy as Jobs. -_-;
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|i smell...
TROLL BAIT
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|Troll.
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|Boy, if you believe that EITHER Steve or Bill have done anything for anyone other than themselves, well I have an OS company to sell you.
I'll make you a really good deal on it, promise.
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|One of the greatest business people to have ever lived. He's created (and destroyed) so many jobs through the industry that has come from his inventions and I can't see there being quite such a massive boom of a product in 5 years for a long, long time to come.
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|Subtract Steve Jobs from the world, and RadioShack and Commodore would have done just fine getting the computer into the hands of the average person, as they did even in this timeline with Jobs.
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|"Subtract Steve Jobs from the world..." ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!! ^__^ You do that and computers as we know it today wouldn't even exist. Computers would still be giant clunky things that only the rich could afford. Guess where Billy boy got his inspiration and "ideas" from to create Windoze? I'll let him tell you in his own words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvskEGWMLp4
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|I thought both Bill Gates and Steve Job got the whole GUI idea from XEROX.
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|Nope. Steve Jobs PURCHASED the GUI from Xerox and M$ STOLE it from Apple. Big difference wouldn't you say?
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|hmm Apple licensed GUI from XEROX and then sell license of Lisa to Microsoft. It's pretty fair to me. (http://en.wikipedia.org/...._Microsoft_Corporation) Care to back up your part? Don't give me another BS youtube link either.
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|The inevitability of the PC's small size had nothing to do with Gates Or Jobs, It was a market driven issue only. Things would have been different perhaps but things still would have progressed fine without them.
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|So long master . . .
we will always remember!!
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|That's nice of you but not necessary. the "master", Steve Jobs hasn't gone anywhere yet. :)
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|. . . and how old are you? . .
let me guess . . no more than 30 . .
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|Dammit! He leaves, and now I have to blame my crappy OS software on two wannabes? Sigh. I need to find someone else to hate now.
Seriously. The man was a master manipulator (I.E. Thief!) but he had style, and a brass set to build the corporation to the big brotheresque conglomerate it is today. Sad to see him go. He was a most excellent scapegoat for all things PC.
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|This is fun. I think it was also linked to from slashdot yesterday:
Classic Clips: Bill Gates Chews Out Microsoft Over XP
http://gizmodo.com/50195...s-out-microsoft-over-xp
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|Subtract Steve Jobs from the world, and the microcomputer would have had a much tougher time finding its home in our lives...but still, I believe, it could have happened. Maybe five or ten years later, but we would have made it. Subtract Bill Gates from the world, and I sincerely believe that instead of freely using our choice of brands of computers on the worldwide Internet, you and I would be complaining openly about our monthly timesharing bill, which we would owe without fail to IBM, AT&T, DEC, Sperry, or some awful conglomeration of them all -- a much larger and more oppressive force than Microsoft ever was or could ever become.
Good points. As madmike says, regardless of what you think of him, I believe the end result is a better world.
One thing is for sure--I trust him to spend money from his foundation in better ways than the government ever could.
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|Whatever you think of Bill Gayes, he made the PC mainstream, worked hard and helped bring people together across the globe.In spite of the good and bad things, at least Bill has helped. Good luck on yer retirement.
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|Everyone of us in the tech biz owes Bill many thanks for his companies inventions and inovations. He created billions of Jobs outside his own company!!!
He will not ever fully be gone from M$.. and unlike apple (when jobs leaves), m$ will continue to grow and be a leader.
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|A visionary and a bright star her left the computing firmament. All we're left with is a cheap accountant (Ballmer) and a hypester's ego. (Jobs).
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|The guy hasn't died has he? This reads like an obituary for Chrissake!
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|Imafurfy,
Wish it was an obit, created an industry where none should have existed.
This is one sick puppy, and StevieB, is even more disfunctional!
But whilst you're on your knees be sure to swallow!
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|Where none should have existed? you must be old school glass house - they're the only ones myopic enough to be so...
...self indulgently ridiculous.
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|Fool,
Myopia has nothing ot do with it!
25 years ago this coming week I founded what became the largest reinsurance brokerage in the southern hemisphere, specialising in hull & airframe.
Our advantage was the quality of our 2 mainframes, and the staff I employed to operate them. these dudes built an internal email system which allowed as a competitive advantage with our insureds' in that we were no longer reliant upon what was then the standard "Teletype".
I liquidated the business, and sold the "Sunset Clauses" in '98, because the costs of PC maintenance, which we moved to in '92, became overwhelming. I had a dozen staff worldwide dedicated to this exercise, and they were costing. Not to mention the downtime due to PC crashes, these support staff offered nothing, they did not produce any premiums. In fact they were an horrendous expense, and I had to employ a manager to oversee this.
Meanwhile, back in the mainframe days, these 2 machines paid for themselves in 2 years, time shared to government agencies for electoral roll, census and the like.
Now, show me a PC that does this?
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|uhh toolie can you probe what you just said?
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|Wow Toolie, aren't you just something special. Truth is, your business sounds like it probably involved a lot of monkeys and footballs.
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|English isn't my native idiom.
I started to work with computers on 1975, IBM /370, a mainframe. What Toolie wrote is absolutely exact, but both, mainframes and PCs, need each other. They're complements and the minds that built them are the same: IBM the mother of the all computers (excuse me Saddam). What do you thinks the big corporations use? Think American Airlines or City Bank, stopping all services to reboot to make an upgrade or correctio. This doesn't exist on the mainframe world. 24/365 and 6 hours.
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|Yup, old school glass house - and insecure at that (as most glass house dinosaurs when the PC robbed them of their power).
The thing of it is, your breed didn't embrace the tool for what it could you - you sinply decried it because you feared the end of an era. The new era was heralded by Gates and Co. - and they brought distributed computing to the household, something the old guard feared more than anything because it meant a loss of control.
The Glass House still has its place - and always will. But the glory days of the guys petitioned by poor humble users for every little crumb of computing power were spolled forever by a young Harvard dropout.
Two things changed humanity permanently in the 20th century:
Gate's Microsoft and the Internet.
No glass house achieved that.
Ironically, it was the largest bastion of glass houses of its time that brought forth the hardware to make it all possible.
How that must rankle you.
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|You did all that and yet here you are, parodying someone and acting like an immature teen? When someone's behavior and their words don't match, I go by their behavior. I'm guessing your underlings weren't very fond of you, no matter how they pretended to when you were around.
http://www.networkmagazi...om/200301/cover15.shtml " Servers running Linux have been known to run for months, even years together without needing to reboot."
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|Someone as immature as you founded a company that actually had and held employees *and* didn't go under in a spectacular display of idiocy?
Yeah, right. And I'm Uncle Sam...
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|mainframes and PCs, need each other.
The database is useless without the PC's to access and distribute the data to the end-users.
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|Sorry, but IBM developed two kinds of database (once again the "mothers" of all databases)
hierarc(IMS) first of all and relational (DB2). Both first used on mainframes. Later... (like Virtual Machine, I started with VM on 70's) on PCs.
Mainframes and PCs are differents concepts, but both have the same goal: users!!
I think Gates is one of the most brilliant men on the last times (centuries), no doubt about, but I can't talk about my children without talk about my father.
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|*laughs*
I never claimed otherwise.
In fact, My implication was exactly as you described. Servers(mainframes, what have you) for the database, PC's to access it.
Never said anything about PCs hosting databases.
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|Exactly my point. The glass house dinosaurs are often so preoccupied with maintaining the database as an end in itself that they fail to see this.
You also have to excuse them - locked in the glass house as they are, they generally don't have the human interaction required to develope social graces. :) :) ;)
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|We had a Windows 2000 server we use as a file server that hasn't been rebooted in a year and a half (we finally felt we needed to reboot it to run those updates around January, but remember since Win2k has been EOL on full support since mid 2006 there haven't been as many updates for it)...it's not impossible, you know. Probably more rare than a Linux server even. I'm just saying that argument isn't a very solid one.
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|Uncle Sam .. is that .. is that you?
Holy cow, it's been so long!
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|"hasn't been rebooted in a year and a half"
You should be fired, not rebooted in a year and a half means it's swiss cheese.
;-)
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|Hmm, no I recall a time where Unix workstations w/ terminals fronted those databases.
I'm guessing you remember it too.
PCs make it convenient to play solitaire while you wait for the query to come back. Back in the old days they just did other work.
;-)
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|Sorry, but before PCs how the database was seen? Of course you can see them, but not on a graphic way like PCs.
OK, break the glass houses, kill all the dinosaurs.
Good luck!
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|You're talking WYSE terminals and their ilk?
PCs make it convenient to play solitaire while you wait for the query to come back.
So cynical. :p
Time to create spreadsheets, documents, and format all of that data into understandable, meaningful dialogue takes a bit more than a WYSE terminal.
...not that I wouldn't mind seeing a few more thin clients around, but we could do *so* much more with them now than we could back in the old days.
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|The system could be locked down behind a hardware firewall. You never know.
Hell, Window 2000, even Windows NT could be configured from release to be damn near impenetrable online...if one took the time to do it.
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|Heh..
He'd be so pissed. (for a fictional character, that is)
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|None of those reasons excuse patching. ;-)
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|yep, terminals are pretty cool these days. Pretty much complete desktop replacements, and they cost less to operate overall.
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|If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Many patches open more vulnerabilities than they close. It's a crap-shoot.
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|