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From: D. Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Sat Jan 9 00:32:12 1999

> Does anybody outside this list even have a clue how much Gates owes
> (no finance involved) to Kemmeny and Kurtz? Without them, how would
> he have started his "career"?

Well, if you hypothetically eliminated BASIC, you wouldn't just change
Microsoft, you would change the entire '70s computer industry. There is a
certain joy in supposing that Microsoft (a minor embedded-systems and
assembly-language development company) didn't survive the "commodity
computer wars" of the early to mid 80's. Who's to say that someone else
wouldn't be just as nasty, though?

Let's be generous and say that everything else worked out pretty much the
same way (including _Dr. Dobbs_, the beginning of the personal-computer
movement, and the "languages for everbody" mentality). I think Microsoft
would have found something else to do. There were other computer languages
they could have ripped off (even sitting on their own PDP-10 system). There
were even other SIMPLE languages they could have used.

Frankly, though, the idea of Microsoft Visual JOSS *does* scare me a little.

-- Derek
Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 00:32:12 GMT