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Our Blogs Open Sauce The BBC, Gates and revisionism
Our Blogs Open Sauce The BBC, Gates and revisionism | The BBC, Gates and revisionism |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Monday, 23 June 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 4 Nobody in Gates' position wants to be remembered as anything other than a brilliant businessman and technical innovator even if an enormous fortune has been built on the back of practices that have often been less than kosher. In 1975, software was not considered the property of any individual. Everybody shared their creations with the other. Not Gates. After he and Allen put together a version of the BASIC programming language based on the original which had been created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz (Dartmouth BASIC), he began screaming "piracy" every time someone else used his version. He and Allen had borrowed much from the public domain but when it came to other people using their version, it wasn't fair. Gates's story is far from that of a boy wonder who went from rags to riches - he is the son of an extremely wealthy Seattle lawyer; his mother was a director of a huge charity connected to several IBM executives at the time when IBM was looking for an operating system for its personal computer. Thus it was not surprising that IBM agreed to talk to Microsoft. The company, which owned no operating system, bought one from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computers for $US50,000, renamed it from Q-DOS (quick and dirty operating system) to MS-DOS, and then licensed it to IBM. Paterson, himself, had copied most of his O-S from CP/M-86 which had been written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research. Kildall, a genius of sorts, did not bother to sue. IBM first went to meet Kildall but he was away, flying his private jet and missed out on being considered for supplying the operating system which IBM was seeking. Cringely has a fascinating account of this in his seminal work Accidental Empires. Back in the 1980s, soon after the first IBM PCs had appeared with MS-DOS, there were many players who wanted to compete with IBM - HP, Zenith, Kidde to name a few. They were all encouraged to take on IBM - and the urging came from Microsoft which had a suite of applications like Multiword (later Word) and the spreadsheet Multiplan (later Excel) which could be ported quickly to various types of hardware. Once these would-be IBM competitors were convinced to buy a version of MS-DOS for their hardware, they would be later told that the applications which ran on IBM's port of MS-DOS would probably not run on their customised versions. |
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