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Gates -- a father of the personal computer and quite the tech powerhouse -- said one of the brightest hopes for clean, cheap power is a new form of nuclear power plant that reuses waste uranium from existing nuclear reactors.
If I were to single out one person above all others as the "father of the personal computer", it would be Chuck Peddle.
I like this historical anecdote:
Chuck naturally turned to Micro-Soft and worked with one of their new hires, Rick Wyland, to develop a version of BASIC that could be built into hardware called a ROM (Read Only Memory). Even though this version would be difficult to steal Gates was not happy because he was sure Chuck's concept was not going to be successful. Chuck tells of a 1976 trip to Microsoft's small office, the in Albuquerque. Gates had told Wyland to "...just get rid of it... he thought is was a waist of time..." Chuck's explains "Gates was not a visionary..." and the quickly follows up with a respectful "...Hell, who is at 20 years old?". As a result, Chuck made a deal that would become legend: at that meeting, he negotiated a stunning unlimited usage, perpetual licence for MS BASIC on ROM for any 6502 based Commodore computer. Out of respect for Bill Gates, Chuck does not want the stunningly low price published, but we can say that over the 20 years Commodore used that licence, it cost them less than a penny per machine. As part of that deal Commodore could enhance Microsoft's BASIC as long as they gave the updates to Microsoft.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian Kernighan
Calling Bill Gates the father of anything in the tech field is a pretty heavy insult to those who were * actually* responsible for the advances in tech. His father is the most successful corporate lawyer in US history so I'm sure he was giving young Bill plenty of tips, but I'm sure none of them had to do with coding or implementation...
Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Stalinist Russia with their propensity to re-write history when it became convenient.
LOL Bill Gates was IBM's 2ND choice. He got lucky.
As I recall, when IBM invented the PC, their first choice for somebody to make DOS was DIGITAL RESEARCH. However, at the time, IBM couldn't get in contact with the DR President because he was on his yacht, enjoying an extended vacation.
IBM finally got tired of waiting on DR, and grudgingly called Billie Boy...
If you ever want to know what really happened back then, such as Billie was disliked even in college, read the book "Hackers":
Regardless of what you may be thinking of Bill Gates.
By selling MS-DOS to IBM clones(and thus stabbing IBM in the back) he freed the hardware market.
And thuds prevented a Hardware/software vendor lock-in liike Apple(or Amiga, Atari for those who remeber other computers).
Kerr wrote:Regardless of what you may be thinking of Bill Gates.
By selling MS-DOS to IBM clones(and thus stabbing IBM in the back) he freed the hardware market.
And thuds prevented a Hardware/software vendor lock-in liike Apple(or Amiga, Atari for those who remeber other computers).
Not quite true - there was an open standard(in more or less the modern sense of the term) that came out before the PC, but it was advertized only as a game console and eventual got given up on(it did, however, attract at lot of business attention in the lower end).
Ludwig von Mises wrote:The elite should be supreme by virtue of persuasion, not by the assistance of firing squads.
"Regardless of what you may be thinking of Bill Gates.
By selling MS-DOS to IBM clones(and thus stabbing IBM in the back) he freed the hardware market.
And thuds prevented a Hardware/software vendor lock-in liike Apple(or Amiga, Atari for those who remeber other computers)."
Further not quite true. IBM was prevented by court decision from dominating both the hardware and software market. It was called unbundling and it occured in the era of the 360 mainframes when 99% of the hardware and software could only be obtained from IBM. So when big blue produced the pc they could either sell the hardware or the os, but not both. They elected to sell the machines and farm out the os development. They took bids and Gates lied his way into the contract.
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