Bitter Bill

Bobby Lee · Post by **Bobby Lee** » 2 Apr 2003 9:38 am

Bill Gates, in his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" mentioned earlier, tells of his sad experience. According to Bill, he and two associates produced the Altair BASIC, investing three man years and burning up $40,000 in computer time. It was sold on commission through MITS for use with Altair computers. Gates now finds that many of the "users" he talks to praise his BASIC very highly, but few of them can admit that they bought the copy they use. His is bitter, and says that the return for his group was less than $2 an hour for the great amount of time they put into the programming, debugging, and documentation required to make a first class package.

- Calvin N. Moores, BYTE Magazine (1976:13 p22)

Ray Jenkins · Post by **Ray Jenkins** » 2 Apr 2003 1:22 pm

Pooooor Bill,he'll probaly never get his money back.

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Steeling is still legal in Arizona

Bill Crook · Post by **Bill Crook** » 3 Apr 2003 6:16 am

Bill Gates DIDN"T develope the "BASIC",nor burn up $40,00 in computer time. He and another cohort purchased it from a little known Computer firm of that time-frame. He(unlike the small computer firm) realized the signifence of this programming "aid" and knew that he and his friends (not yet knowned as "Microsoft") could sell this to the,at that time,computing world,and make a fortune. Thus, it happened that way !!

As most of us know now,He developed this small package into the "Microsoft" world and from that point on,we (the public)have been supporting one of the worlds richest persons.

There is NO way he can ever spend the vast amount of money he has accumilated. His $$$ value is more than ½ of the worlds 3rd power nations. It's no wonder that "Microsoft" came out on top of the lawsuites attemp[ted by the federal Goverment.

This reply is NOT intended to bash Mr. Gates, but only to inform folks of the reality of what really happended. If anyone is interested in finding out the real truth, one only needs to go to the local libary and do a search on "Computers" and its development.

Just my 2cents.

[This message was edited by Bill Crook on 03 April 2003 at 06:17 AM.]

BDBassett · Post by **BDBassett** » 3 Apr 2003 7:03 am

Let's not confuse BASIC with DOS.
I believe he did develop, or perhaps 'refine' is a better word, BASIC but did purchase DOS for $50,000.
I may be wrong, but...

Leroy Riggs · Post by **Leroy Riggs** » 3 Apr 2003 7:46 pm

Bill Gates DIDN"T develope the "BASIC"

BASIC or "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code1" was invented by a U. S Navy Captain so she could teach her students the basics of computer programming while teaching at Annapolis. Most college students today have never heard the word but it was a required course when I was in engineering school many years ago.

Nevertheless, poor Bill.

[This message was edited by Leroy Riggs on 03 April 2003 at 07:49 PM.]

Dave Horch · Post by **Dave Horch** » 3 Apr 2003 9:03 pm

5 COMMENT - THIS IS A TEST
10 PRINT "HI THERE!"
20 INPUT "WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"; A$
30 PRINT "HEY "; A$; "CAN YOU PLAY THE TURN AROUND TO 'LOST IN THE FEELING?'"
40 INPUT B$
50 PRINT B$;"WOW!"; B$; "PLEASE POST IT"
60 END

Uh Oh... Syntax error?!

Leroy Riggs · Post by **Leroy Riggs** » 4 Apr 2003 11:13 am

Dave, you've been there!

Colin Goss · Post by **Colin Goss** » 4 Apr 2003 11:20 pm

I think you will find that he acquired "QDOS" which at that time was a "Quick and dirty operating system". Certainly it was the secenario of "right place right time". Because he got IBM to include it on their PCs.

Gene Jones · Post by **Gene Jones** » 5 Apr 2003 6:14 am

About all I remember from those days is Computer Programming I in college and standing in line at midnight to take my turn using one of those frustrating card-readers to see if my program worked (and usually it didn't)....the combination drove me away from computers for about 30 years, or until WYSIWYG!
www.genejones.com

Bobby Lee · Post by **Bobby Lee** » 5 Apr 2003 7:21 am

Gary Kildall (of CP/M fame) blew off the meeting with IBM, so they went to Gates. Microsoft wasn't their first choice!

Joe Delaronde · Post by **Joe Delaronde** » 6 Apr 2003 8:02 pm

Dave
Looks like good old Commodore 64 days all over again.

Joe

Miguel e Smith · Post by **Miguel e Smith** » 7 Apr 2003 11:11 am

I gave away my CP/M KayPro a few years back bOb. I hadn't used it in years but it made a nice conversation piece. It's rare that even computer students nowadays have even heard of CP/M. It was an early "portable" which was larger than a lot of towers now. But I thought I was cool when I was wagging it around the country in a bus.

Mike

Jeff Agnew · Post by **Jeff Agnew** » 7 Apr 2003 4:43 pm

BASIC or "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code1" was invented by a U. S Navy Captain so she could teach her students the basics of computer programming while teaching at Annapolis.

No, that's not entirely correct. Commander Grace Hopper did indeed invent a language but it was not BASIC, it was COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language).

JB Arnold · Post by **JB Arnold** » 7 Apr 2003 6:49 pm

Man I HATED COBOL. Had to learn that in College...what a nightmare.
JB

Don Walters · Post by **Don Walters** » 7 Apr 2003 8:00 pm

BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College in 1964 (a brief history)

One of my profs always said "dart - mouth"

Gene Jones · Post by **Gene Jones** » 8 Apr 2003 8:43 am

COBOL....(shudder...what a killer)....

DroopyPawn · Post by **DroopyPawn** » 13 Apr 2003 8:44 pm

I prefer Visual Basic.

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Recluse · Post by **Recluse** » 15 Apr 2003 4:11 pm

Seems some of us are old enough to pop from the wrong stack.
Steve Bailey

b0b · Post by **b0b** » 15 Apr 2003 5:52 pm

Forth has two stacks.

Earnest Bovine · Post by **Earnest Bovine** » 15 Apr 2003 8:43 pm

Forth has two stacks.

I have never seen Forth source code but I disassembled a Forth program once and found 3 stacks, with one of the 68000's address registers dedicated to each one. One was return addresses for the program counter (sometimes erroneously called the instruction pointer), one pointed at a stack of variables, and the 3rd, I forget what it was but it was used less than the other two.

David L. Donald · Post by **David L. Donald** » 16 Apr 2003 1:16 am

Back in the 60's (shudder) I was hooked up to Dartmouth's server a few times a week with the ITT teletype machine with the tickertape rolls. Now I have more computing power in my portable phone.
COBOL is an alternate spelling of hell.

But the kid across the hall did a programming of Whiffin Poof submited it to the post-grad programming compitition and won 4th place / honorable mention.
Not bad for a 13 year old. His dad was a retired navy sub captain and state congressman. With those connections I imagine this kid is now deeply in the black at NSA or some gov. agency, or a multi-millionaire contractor.
Nice guy and a great programmer even at that age. I periodicaly wonder where he got to.

Gene Jones · Post by **Gene Jones** » 16 Apr 2003 4:07 am

Ah, technology!

When we designed the first CAD for the Oklahoma City Fire Department in the 1970's the total cost was about $400,000 and the hardware required a climate controlled area as large as my bedroom. At that time, the only other "working" CAD in existance for Fire Department Operations was Huntington Beach/Fountain Valley, California, who we used as a model.

When we needed an upgrade about six years later, we found that "off the shelf" technology from Radio Shack for about $40,000 already exceeded the capability of our orignal system.

Today, the $1900 system sitting on my desk at home that I'm sending this message with, far exceeds the capability of the original system and the upgrade combined.

I am glad that we live in a country that provides incentives for entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Henry Ford and all of the others, to develop technology of value to mankind from the automobile to the NASA space program. So they become wealthy along the way, and a few of them become despots, but without them we would still be a third-world country.

Let 'em be rich and bring on more of them.....there isn't an hour in a day when we don't enjoy or benefit from their work. www.genejones.com

[This message was edited by Gene Jones on 16 April 2003 at 08:30 AM.]

Larry Beck · Post by **Larry Beck** » 16 Apr 2003 8:31 am

1.) During Micro$oft's trial with the DOJ, Jim Alchin, MS Head of platform development, maintained that releasing MS's APIs to competitors would constitute a "National Security" breach.
2.) MS just agreed to share it's source code with Russia and with China.

can you say corporate cognitive dissonance?

b0b · Post by **b0b** » 16 Apr 2003 9:19 am

Earnest:

From the programmer's point of view, Forth has two stacks: the parameter stack and the return stack. Under the hood, the implementation can have additional stacks that are not exposed in the language, or are exposed in non-portable extensions to the language. Since Forth often includes an assembler, a savvy programmer does have access to the underlying code, but the assembler and implementation details are not part of the language specification.

And, of course, a Forth application can implement any number of stacks, complete with methods to manipulate them. But the standard Forth language is a two stack model.

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<img align=left src="http://b0b.com/coolb0b2.gif" border="0"> Bobby Lee
-b0b- quasar@b0b.com 
-System Administrator

Earnest Bovine · Post by **Earnest Bovine** » 16 Apr 2003 11:03 am

b0b, that does very little to explain some programmers' fanatical devotion to Forth.