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From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Sat Jan 9 00:56:57 1999

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, D. Peschel wrote:

> Well, if you hypothetically eliminated BASIC, you wouldn't just change
> Microsoft, you would change the entire '70s computer industry. There is a

Yup, Gates wasn't ripping off Kemeny and Kurtz, he was just implementing
an already popular bad language that many others had implemented as well.
It was even running on personal computers such as the PDP-8 and IBM 9830
well before Gates came along.

> 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?

The year was 1975, and Gates doesn't exist. What does exist? The GUI.
Ethernet. SmallTalk. C. Unix. In short, really good stuff that Gates
wouldn't get around to asking his worker bees to implement for another
10-20 years.

I find this very sad. I feel the PC was shortchanged and that progress
was stifled for a very long time due to this short-sighted weenie. The
Altair, BASIC, and CP/M essentially evolved from 1960 era minicomputer
technology. Perhaps RAM was too expensive for something as cool as the
Amiga to have happened in 1975, but if Bill Gates had stayed home and
Linus Torvalds had been born a little earlier, man what a cool world we'd
have today, 25 years later.

-- Doug
Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 00:56:57 GMT