Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

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I cannot see into alternate universes

You don't have to see into alternate universes. You just have to be old enough to have already lived in one. The one before Microsoft.

I suspect that alot of the Bill Gates/Microsoft love/hate splits along age lines. If you're under 40, you're not old enough to have experienced the glorious pre-Microsoft days. We worked on all kinds of cool stuff, IBM mainframes (the good and the bad), the mini-computers (VAX, PDP, etc.), the Bell Labs stuff (Unix!), and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OS2, CPM, & Pick.

Then all of a sudden, our customers started abandoning all this great technology for Microsoft. Why? Because it was better? No, because it was shoved down their throats. Because when it couldn't win by technical merits, it won other ways, with back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying.

Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops and replacing it with Linux. What they may not realize is that this technology is not new; it was around 40 years ago. They just didn't have to suffer through the 20 year Microsoft technology drought like some of us did.

I understand that industries consolidate and that many great products and technologies die. But they should die in the marketplace, not in the courtroom or the lobbyists' offices.

If Kobe Bryant beats your team with great talent, hard work, and superior play, you'd congratulate him. But you'd be awfully pissed if he never dribbled but never got whistled because his lawyers already made arrangements in Commission Stern's offices before the game. This was standard operating procedure for Microsoft for years.

We'd still be suffering if it wasn't for the internet. I suppose if I was under 30, I'd just think it was always open and hopeful like it is now. But for a long time it wasn't. And to answer OP's original question, a lot of people in Silicon Valley were in that alternate universe you missed and they don't forget.

That's funny, my friend (who was a very early MSFT employee) tells a different story. There were a bunch of different competing technologies. Writing a program for all of them meant writing it over and over, so nobody did this. The market was small and fragmented, and nobody really believed you could get huge as a software company. Bill's parents wanted him to finish his schooling instead of dropping out to start Microsoft as a result.

Businesses were confounded because some of the software they wanted ran only on one stack, some ran on another. Consumer adoption was nonexistent because switching from one OS to another required learning everything all over again. You couldn't simply go to Best Buy, get some software or hardware, and assume it would work. Hardware fragmentation kept sales down, which in turn kept pricing high, which in turn kept sales down, etc.

Either way, none of that "good old days" stuff is really the point when analyzing whether or not the world would be better off without Bill. The industry progressed, as it would have without Microsoft. We know it would have evolved, we just don't know exactly how. It seems virtually impossible to me that it wouldn't have ended in one OS on most people's desks, but I am willing to admit I may be wrong. If it weren't for Bill, we may all have been running IBM's OS for the last 20 years instead. Or maybe we weren't buying them at all, because they cost too much and were too fragmented. Would either of those universes really be better? Nobody could possibly know.

Microsoft's standard operating procedure was part of the game. You may not like it, but IP suits and lobbying are as much a part of big business as dribbling is basketball. That was the case long before Bill Gates arrived and will be so long after he's dead. You're hating the player instead of the game.

> Writing a program for all of them meant writing it over and over

Not quite correct. Companies ported programs, even assembly-language programs, to different processors all the time. Visicalc ran on z-80s, 6502s (on Apples, Ataris and Commodores) and 8086s. the hard part is to write it the first time. Porting then is more or less straightforward. OSs were so minimalistic at that time they didn't create any significant difference.

> Businesses were confounded because some of the software they wanted ran only on one stack, some ran on another

Most business software for microcomputers in the high 70's and very low 80's ran on CP/M. Even the first DOS blockbusters were straight ports of CP/M titles. CP/M (I am talking about CP/M 80) machines were all based on 8080-like processors, but, besides the common processor, had very different hardware - disks from one computer often could not be read on another. Transferring through serial ports usually solved this.

The market that was more fragmented was the home computer market. There Apple IIs, Ataris, TRS-80s and Commodores competed with one another. Choosing a home computer could be confusing at that time.

The higher end of the spectrum had mainframes, just as incompatible with each other as they are now (I think Unisys still makes them and they are incompatible with IBMs), minis that ran proprietary OSs or UNIX-based OSs. There were a couple high-end multiuser "supermicros" that ran Unix-like OSs. I have used Cromix for some time.

Most of the software was not easily portable at that time because it was written in hand-tuned assembly language. I remember how revolutionary Unix seemed for being written in C and, thus, being portable across different architectures. Faster computers and HLLs (can't believe I am calling C a HLL...) eased the pain of porting.

My bet? Were it not for Gates, today we would have a diverse computing environment, with different OSs and processors, with cross-platform software being used in combination with open formats (like GIF was intended to be) to exchange data between non-portable (or non-ported) programs. There would be large software companies but hardware makers would compete with far more latitude than they can now and those software companies would do their best to use the tricks those hardware makers would bring.

> You may not like it, but IP suits and lobbying are as much a part of big business as dribbling is basketball

You're right. I don't like it. I think software companies should gain market through technical merits that benefit their users, not backstabbing each other.

Certainly porting happened, but the market was very fragmented. That was why Office was born in the first place.

My bet for what would have happened: one of two things.

1. Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did and you'd be complaining about them instead. Except maybe you wouldn't be complaining because nobody would have written this article because whoever benefited from it would have hoarded their money as most billionaires do rather than becoming the greatest philanthropist of all time.

2. Hacker News wouldn't exist for you to comment on, because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it.

I don't think any other result is possible (and I don't think the 2nd is practical). Users simply aren't savvy enough to deal with fragmentation. You wouldn't have the web we know today without cheap home PCs anymore than you'd have man without the apes.

> That was why Office was born in the first place.

Office was never "born". Not even designed as a suite. It was cobbled together. Word and Excel were independent products developed originally for the Mac. PowerPoint was acquired and Access developed internally.

> Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did

Striking a deal with IBM, retaining the rights to the OS and cooperating with OEMs so they could clone their client's hardware? It takes a devious mind to come up with a plan like this.

> because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it

I don't know about you, but I had a lot of fun with my Apple II. Bill Gates had nothing to do with the popularization of the home computer. In fact, he may something to do with the demise of the home computer of the 80's and its replacement by bulky, noisy, beige boxes with 12-inch CGA monitors running MS-DOS (a most home-unfriendly OS). My Apple II+ had 2 screens, one 14" white monochrome soft-switching between the motherboard video and the 80-column card and a 17" color TV directly connected to the motherboard composite output. Sadly, the IIe could not do the same trick (I used to have text on one screen and graphics on the second)

Bill Gates had nothing to do with the popularization of the home computer.

Anyone heard of Microsoft BASIC? How about Applesoft?

Bueller...?

There were many competing implementations of BASIC interpreters at the time. If it weren't for Applesoft, Wozniak would have finished his floating-point BASIC (he did the Integer BASIC that came with the II). IIRC, Atari computers didn't use Microsoft BASIC, nor did the BBC family in the UK.

And, BTW, Paul Allen deserves more credit for MS BASIC than is usually given.

My bet? Were it not for Gates, today we would have a diverse computing environment, with different OSs and processors...

... any of which you can buy for $5,000.00.

It seems that anti-Microsoft arguments always ignore the benefits of network effects and economies of scale brought about by DOS and Windows. They are usually posted by Linux nerds running sub-$1000 3 GHz PCs that they couldn't possibly have afforded in a world where Apple, Commodore, Atari, and ten more companies like them kept building mutually- incompatible proprietary hardware.

This is the sort of discussions I love best on HN:

I read a thoughtful comment and have no choice but upvote it because it's very thought provoking and I'm nodding all the way through it. Then I read the opponent's comment ... and feel the same way!

> Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops

I am an old hacker and I always feel better when I remove Windows from a laptop.

I am an old hacker, and proud to admit that I have never owned a Microsoft product.

Their keyboards and mice are excellent. My Z-80 SoftCard II probably still works.

I cannot stand their keyboards. Gushy non-mechanical switches and awkward non-standard layouts. Pshh!

The natural ones allowed me to cut my pain medication ;-)

Not that I wrote that, I also noticed I no longer use any Microsoft software. That can also explain the pain medication...

I am a young(ish) hacker, and I'm proud not to engage in religious nonsense like this at all. Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares? Get on with the coding already.

A real craftsman cares for the tools he uses. And it's not a religious issue - it's just that the thing is taking up space on an NTFS partition. I can store better stuff in that space.

Sometimes a real craftsman needs one of those esoteric tools that they usually have no need for.

A real craftsman also cares about having the output of his craft be useful/enjoyable to other people. And sometimes this means, having to make it work on a system that other people use, and not the one that you use. Just saying.

> Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares?

Because they're different. Craftsmen like to learn and make distinctions and use the best tool for the job.

I remember buying a 486 DX 66 Mhz from a local computer shop, and it was within my parents price range because that computer shop assembled the PCs themselves. And the best thing about it ... it was a standard, and I could find tons of cool shit to run on it.

Of course, I live in Eastern Europe, maybe you guys in the US have been more lucky in regards to access to mainframes / Unix operating systems ... I wasn't.

It is interesting that you are glorifying OS/2 as an alternative to "back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying" when it was the keystone of IBM's naked plot to monopolize the PC industry through patent-locked hardware.

There is the technologist fantasy that in a world without Microsoft, we would be have this wonderful diversity of competing platforms. And then there is the reality that the alternatives were in most cases far worse than Microsoft for customers. And this was obvious to the people paying the bills at the time.

Reminds me of the comment about people not knowing what the real game being played is. They think the rules are a certain way when in fact reality has a very different set that they are incapable of operating within. They faced innovation outside the technical arena and got beat. Then they want to complain about the 'rules.'

Based on this logic, assassinations are 'fair game' so long as you don't get caught. Would I be an 'innovator' if I developed a way for corporate-directed assassinations to become a reality?

You would be an innovator. Whether assassinations are within the rules is a question I am not qualified to answer. It IS within the rules in some places and not others, I suspect that evolves over time.

HA! Not 40, but am damn close to it. I remember those days. We had a billion different types of media. I still have CP/M disk I can't read. And nobody really knew how to run anything. Like the dinosaurs, it was a time of mainframes. Then everyone can do it, welcome to the PC world. And (oh my goodness) standardization. Oh wait, it's mainframe time again? Cloud what? You mean I can bring out my bell-bottoms again? for the nth time... I'm glad someone was a dick, because just image all the different ways we can do things today! Scary.

> Like the dinosaurs, it was a time of mainframes. Then everyone can do it, welcome to the PC world.

It seems you missed the years when the first S-100 personal computers appeared, the time when they ran CP/M, the Apple II, the Commodores, the Ataris... IBM-PCs were introduced in 1981 and didn't became as important as they are today until they were successfully cloned, a couple years later. Basically, you just skipped the 70's. And the minicomputers where VMS (the granddaddy of NT) and Unix were born.

> [...] and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OSX, CPM, & Pick.

Youngster here: I'm guessing when you say OSX you mean something other than Mac OS X?

Oops, I meant OS2. Original corrected.

Well all these wonderful technologies were probably really expensive. Microsoft managed to make the cheap PCs usable, that is why they won. As for OS 2, I don't know why they failed, but I suspect it is not because of Microsoft.

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