Re.: Does Bill Gates know how to program?

From: Richard A. Cini, Jr. <rcini_at_email.msn.com>
Date: Sun Sep 20 08:17:03 1998

On Sat, 19 Sep 1998 12:56:06 PDT, "Max Eskin" <maxeskin_at_hotmail.com> wrote:


>>I believe his last program was in 1986 for a Tandy machine. He's been
>>strictly buisness after that.

    Didn't Gates work on the BASIC on the Model 100?

    At the risk of a flame war...I think that Gates walks a razor-thin line
between really aggressive and monopolistic. No question, he and Microsoft
are successful, through a combination of luck, brass balls, and the paranoid
fear of being technologically overtaken by another technology company. I
also think that a portion of Microsoft's problems today can be attributed to
sour grapes by some of the competition, fueled by books and articles in
recent years which showcase Gates' incredible wealth and Microsoft's amazing
success.

    Now, back to our regularly-scheduled program...

    The earliest programming example comes from "Gates" by Stephen Manes and
Paul Andrews. Gates and Allen worked on an 8080 emulator on Aiken Lab's
(Harvard) PDP10s during the winter '75 break. The Altair Basic command set
was lifted from DEC's RSTS-11 Basic-Plus, which Gates considered elegant.
The simulator code was dated 2/9/75.

    "Programmers at Work" by Susan Lammers quotes Gates as saying that there
wasn't a program at Microsoft (at the time; the book is (c) 1986, 1989) in
which he was not involved. Microsoft's Basic interpreter products are
attributed to Gates, as is the work on the Model 100. At the time, Microsoft
had 160 programmers, and Gates was intimately involved in the code review
process, noting that there wasn't a piece of code which he didn't read.


Rich Cini/WUGNET
  - ClubWin!/CW7
  - MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
  - Collector of "classic" computers
<========= reply separator ==========>
Received on Sun Sep 20 1998 - 08:17:03 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:31:35 BST