Microsoft’s original source code
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
;WE COULD NOT FIT THE NUMBER INTO THE BUFFER DESPITE OUR VALIENT
;EFFORTS WE MUST POP ALL THE CHARACTERS BACK OFF THE STACK AND
;POP OFF THE BEGINNING BUFFER PRINT LOCATION AND INPUT A "%" SIGN THERE
;CONSTANTS FOR THE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR FOLLOW
;DO NOT CHANGE THESE WITHOUT CONSULTING KNUTH VOL 2
;CHAPTER 3 FIRST
They weren't integrated into programming-oriented editors, and it would have been unusual to run them against code.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=streetsi...
I have this in my vimrc file so it's on by default for certain file types:
" Turn on spellcheck for certain filetypes and word completion.
" words can be added to the dict by pressing 'zg' with cursor on word.
autocmd Filetype markdown setlocal spell
autocmd Filetype gitcommit setlocal spell
set complete+=kspell
" Don't highlight in red an underscore (_) in markdown
" https://vi.stackexchange.com/q/18471/17441
autocmd Filetype markdown syn match markdownIgnore "\v\w_\w"
You can also add it directly when using it. Move the cursor to the word and (I forget the command...) can add it as a rare word, good word or bad word.
https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/637761-i-write-code-progra...
We can do better than blaming people for falling in pitfalls of a system full of odd traps.
The font-shimmering effect on scroll immediately reminded me of that, it is really distracting. And you can’t use reader mode to disable it.
(FWIW, I’m a fan of Bill Gates and all he’s done for the world)
It has way fancier animations and scrolls like butter
The voice of this blog post does sound a little corporate, tbh
Most corporations dont know how to do it
EDIT: Good god they animated EVERYTHING. It's not even readable... also... not one inline code sample? This is the designer trying to get an awwwards site of the day without any interest in the actual content. It's like a guitar player that solos over everyone else's solos.
Writing a BASIC interpreter, with floating point, is much harder. Gates, Allen and other collaborators BASIC was pretty damned good.
The computer came with some pretty good books with example BASIC programs to type in.
And Bill Gates complaining about pirating $150 Altair BASIC inspired the creation of Tiny BASIC, as well as the coining of "copyleft".
The floating point routines are Monte Davidoff's work. But yes, Gates and Allen writing Altair BASIC on the Harvard PDP-10 without ever actually seeing a real Altair, then having it work on the first try after laboriously entering it with toggle switches at MITS in Albuquerque, was a remarkable achievement.
I don't see why it would be tricky. I don't know how Allen's 8080 emulator on the PDP-10 worked, but it seems straightforward to emulate 8080 I/O.
Actually, one of my programmer colleagues did try to buy our Dec10 when it was decommissioned, with all peripherals, and install it in his garage. Power supply and wife were major obstacles.
https://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html
Then, their BASIC was debugged by running it on the emulator.
The genius was not the difficulty of doing that, it wasn't hard. The genius was the idea of writing an 8080 emulator. Wozniak, in comparison, wrote Apple code all by hand in assembler and then hand-assembled it to binary, a very tedious and error-prone method.
In the same time period, I worked at Aph, and we were developing code that ran on the 6800 and other microprocessors. We used full-fledged macro assemblers running on the PDP-11 to assemble the code into binary, and then download binary into an EPROM which was then inserted into the computer and run. Having a professional macro assembler and text editors on the -11 was an enormous productivity boost, with far fewer errors. (Dan O'Dowd wrote those assemblers.)
(I'm doing something similar with my efforts to write an AArch64 code generator. First I wrote a disassembler for it, testing it by generating AArch64 code via gcc, disassembling that with objdump and then comparing the results with my disassmbler. This helps enormously in verifying that the correct binary is being generated. Since there are thousands of instructions in the AArch64, this is a much scaled up version of the 8080.)
So I wrote my on assembler in BASIC :)
[1] Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/bill-steve-jobs-remini...
What is hard is skipping the high level language step, and trying to do it in assembler in one step.
However, crafting an algorithm that uses IEEE arithmetic and avoids the limitations of IEEE is hard.
With fixed point numbers, you write the digits into the memory and have a convention that the decimal point is always after N-th digit. For example, if we agree that the point is always after 2-nd digit then a string 000123 is interpreted as 00.0123 and 123000 means 1230. Using this system with 6 digits we can represent numbers from 0 to 9999 to precision of 0.01.
With floating point, you write both decimal point position (which we call "exponent") and digits (called "mantissa"). Let's agree that the first two digits are the exponent (point position) and the rest four is mantissa. Then this number:
020123
That's all you need to know, and the rest should be easy to figure out.
1. the digits
2. the exponent
3. a sign bit
If you're familiar with scientific notation, yes, it's the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation
The rest is just the inevitable consequences of that.
And by the way engineering notation (where exponent must divide by 3) is so much better. I hate converting things like 2.234·10¹¹ into billions in my head.
And by the way (unrelated to floating point) mathematicians could make better names for things, for example instead of "numerator" and "denominator" they could use "upper" and "lower number". So much easier!
Floating point at it's simplest just makes that a variable. So the (.) position is stored as a separate number. Now instead of being fixed - it floats around.
This way you can put more in the integer or more in the fraction.
The Microsoft Basic here used 23 bits for the number, 1 sign bit and 8 bits to say where the floating point should be placed.
Of course in practice you have to deal with a lot of details depending on how robust you want your system. This Basic was not as robost as modern IEEE754 but it did the job.
Reading more about IEE754 is a fascinating way to learn about modern floating point. I also recommend Bruce Dawson's observations on his Random ASCII blog.
Chapter 16, pages 8-10, gives a very concise description of the process.
Looking backwards, writing an integer basic is a trivial exercise. But back in the 70s, I had no idea how to write such a thing.
Around 1978, Hal Finney (yes, that guy) wrote an integer basic for the Mattel Intellivision (with its wacky 10 bit microprocessor) that fit in a 2K EPROM. Of course, Hal was (a lot) smarter than the average bear.
What I was trying to express—perhaps poorly—is that maybe floating-point support would have been more effort than the entire Integer BASIC. (Incidentally, as I understand it, nobody has found a bug in Apple Integer BASIC yet, which makes it a nontrivial achievement from my point of view.)
http://retro.hansotten.nl/uploads/mag6502/Apples%20Hidden%20...
It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make it", "if it works you shipped too late" hustle culture that took hold of the industry, with entire products just being API wrappers. Really hope we see more companies that start out like Microsoft again.
The PDP-10 probably worked at "human speed" too...
They are the all-time greatest in fake-it-til-you-make-it. They got the IBM PC OS contract without having an OS, which they bought from someone else (iirc).
> What stands out to me about Gates and Allen is the serious technical chops. Writing an emulator for the PDP-10 and then an interpreter, line editor, I/O system all in 4KB of memory.
Is that really so impressive? Everything then was in 4K, from all coders.
VS
Some college students selling software they didn't have and getting it ready from 0 to sellable in 2 months which led to a behemoth that still innovates to this day.
Google started similarly with PageRank as far as I remember.
Many undergrad examples as well in the web era, from Excite to Facebook to Snapchat.
(Note the unanticipated consequences aren't always good.)
That August, a three-piece-suited contingent led by Jack Sams
approached us about Project Chess, the code name for what would
become IBM’s PC. After we talked them out of an 8-bit machine
and won them over to the Intel 8086 (or as it turned out, the
cheaper but virtually identical 8088), they wanted everything in
our 16- bit cupboard, including FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal.
Aside from BASIC, none of these products were even close to being
ready for the 8086 platform. It would take a wild scramble to get
them all done on IBM’s tight timetable.
Then, in late September, Sams asked us if we could provide
a 16-bit operating system. We referred him to Digital Research,
which we’d heard was far along in building one. Bill called Gary
Kildall and said, “I’m sending some people over to you, and I want
you to be good to them, because you and I are both going to make
a lot of money on this deal.” He didn’t mention IBM by name be
cause the company insisted on maximum discretion and secrecy.
We’d had to sign a nondisclosure agreement before they’d even sit
down with us.
As Kildall himself later acknowledged, he was off flying on
business when the Project Chess group arrived. His wife, who was also
his business partner, refused to sign the nondisclosure and offered
a Digital Research document instead. That was something you did
not do with IBM. Sams came back to us and said, “I don’t think
we can work with those guys—it would take our legal department
six months to clear the paperwork. Do you have any other ideas?
Could you handle this on your own?”
After the fact, there would be endless rumors about Microsoft’s
dealings with Digital Research. Kildall theorized that IBM chose to
work with us because we were willing to license an operating system
for a flat fee, while Kildall insisted on a per-copy royalty. But
I had a front-row seat, and this is what happened: We tried to do
Digital Research a favor, and they blew it. They dropped the ball.
I vividly remember how furious Bill was at what had transpired.
He couldn’t believe that Kildall had blown this golden chance and
placed the whole project in jeopardy.
Bill called an emergency meeting with me and Kay Nishi. What
could we do to resuscitate the deal? There was silence for a
moment, and then I said, “There’s another operating system that
might work. I don’t know how good it is, but I think I can get it
for a reasonable price.” I told them the story of Tim Patterson and
Seattle Computer Products, which began shipping its 8086 machine
earlier that year but had found sparse commercial interest.
The missing link was an operating system. Kildall had promised a
CP/M-86 by the first of the year, but he hadn’t delivered; his
company lacked the typical start-up’s urgency. No one knew when his
16-bit software would make it to market.
Tim Patterson had gotten frustrated waiting. Our BASIC-86
was fine for writing programs, but his customers couldn’t run a
word processor or other applications on top of it. So Tim had
cobbled together a provisional 16-bit operating system to help his
company sell a few computers until Kildall came through. (As Tim
later said, “We would have been perfectly happy having somebody
else do the operating system. If [Digital Research] had delivered
in December of ’79, there wouldn’t be anything but CP/M in this
world today.”) He called the program QDOS, for Quick and Dirty
Operating System, which he’d managed to cram into 6K of code.
Once it was mostly done, he changed the name to 86-DOS.
[text deleted]
Bill was less enthusiastic. He didn’t know Tim Patterson, and
we’d be betting our deal with IBM—the most critical one we’d
ever have— on an unknown quantity once called Quick and Dirty.
But Bill realized that we might lose the whole contract unless we
came up with something, and he went along.
I called Rod Brock, who owned Seattle Computer Products, to
work out a licensing agreement. We settled on $10,000, plus a royalty
of $15,000 for every company that licensed the software—a
total of $25,000 for now, as we had only one customer. The next
day, a Microsoft delegation (Bill, Steve, and Bob O’Rear) met with
IBM in Boca Raton and proposed that Microsoft coordinate the
overall software development process for the PC. Five weeks later,
the contract was signed. IBM would pay us a total of $430,000:
$75,000 for “adaptations, testing, and consultation”; $45,000 for
the disk operating system (DOS); and $310,000 for an array of 16-
bit language interpreters and compilers.
Bill and I were willing to forgo per-copy royalties if we could
freely license the DOS software to other manufacturers, our old
strategy for Altair BASIC. Already enmeshed in antitrust litigation,
IBM readily bought this nonexclusive arrangement. They’d later
be slammed for giving away the store, but few people at the time
discerned how quickly the industry was changing. And no one, including
us, foresaw that the IBM deal would ultimately make
Microsoft the largest tech company of its day, or that Bill and I would
become wealthy beyond our imagining.I personally encountered people arguing that using PCs (as opposed to VAXen or mainframes) was a waste of time as late as 01992. And I actually even sort of joined them; although I'd been using PCs since before the IBM PC, once I got access to the internet in 01992, I pretty much stopped using PCs as anything but a terminal or a game machine for years, spending virtually 100% of my computer time on VMS or Ultrix. When I was using PCs again, it was because I could run BSD/386 and Linux on them, in 01994.
(Maybe you'd assume from my own story of enthusiastic adoption that "nobody ever sat in countless meetings asking[,] "How can we use the internet?"', but if so, you'd be extremely wrong. In 01992 and even in 01994 there were lots of people who thought the internet was useless or a fad. Bill Gates's The Road Ahead, published November 01995, barely mentioned the internet, instead treating it as a sort of failed experiment that would be supplanted by the Information Superhighway. Metcalfe predicted in 01996 that it would collapse. David Isenberg was still arguing against "Bellheads" and their "Advanced Intelligent Network" in 01997: https://isen.com/stupid.html)
It can be easy looking back in retrospect to oversimplify events like these with the benefit of hindsight, imagining that the things that seem obvious now were obvious then. But not only weren't they obvious—in many cases, they could have turned out differently. I think it was Alan Kay that argued that, without the invention of the sort of graphical user interface used by most non-cellphone personal computers today, the personal computer as we know it never would have become a mass-market phenomenon (though video game consoles were) and therefore Moore's Law would have stalled out decades ago. I'm not sure he was right, but it seems like a plausible alternate history to me.
Of course, there were "killer apps" as early as VisiCalc for the Apple ][. Accountants and corporate executives were willing to read through the manual and take the time to learn how to use it, because it was such a powerful tool for what they were doing. But it was designed for specialists; it's not a UI that rewards casual use the way Excel or MacPaint or NCSA Mosaic is. Without the GUI, or if the GUI had come much later, plausibly personal computers would have remained a niche hobbyist thing for much longer, while somebody like Nintendo would have locked down the unwashed-masses platform—as we now see happening with Android. And (maybe this is obvious) that would have made it immensely less useful.
https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...
Curiously this isn't the oldest extant version of the source code. The Harvard archives have a copy of version 1.1, printed on 30 April 75. http://altairbasic.org/other%20versions/ian.htm
And, btw, great infographics within the post.
So my money is that the code I wrote today is the joke of tomorrow - for all involved.
Also, I for one don’t want to go back to punch cards ;)
I am guessing that generation that transitioned from Pax Romana to early middle ages in Europe.
Remember it took until the Renaissance until ancient texts (Greek and Roman) were “rediscovered” by European scholars.
I think 2075 developers will feel the same way about modern Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.
They will think of themselves as software developers but they won't be writing code the same way, they'll be giving guided instructions to much higher level tools (perhaps AIs that themselves have a provenance back to modern LLMs)
Just as today there will still be those that need to write low level critical code. There are still lots of people today that have to write Assembler, though end up expressing it via C or Rust. And there will be people still working on AI technology. But even those will be built off other AI's.
I notice his interview on Democracy Now : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jPzzjbVuk
This guys mental map is impressive, as are the color of his book titles : https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16872611.Malcolm_Harri...
"Cosmetic offering to the financial markets to show that Silicon Valley still can control its labor costs... It's less the future flow of funds is improved ... than that they're signaling something to the markets ..."
Not that he's unique in this, but I do really appreciate his book lists. I usually grab a few books during the year based on his recommendations.
To paraphrase him a little bit:
Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network of dealerships with mechanics on staff.
Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are expensive.
Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from sophisticated space aged materials.
The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...
I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays).
Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies them as pure breed hackers to me.
Back in the day (70s(?)80s) computers shipped with the programming language manual. All I got was a CDROM of ENCARTA and a slip to mail in for a restore set of MS DOS / WIN 3.1 diskettes(which was sorely needed I might add).
In the late 70s to early 80s you got a programming manual, but you had to save your programs on cassette tapes.
In the late 80s, you got glossy manuals which showed you how to turn on the computer, hook up a printer and load a program from DOS.
In the early 90s, the manuals were plain paper, smaller, and had instructions on how to use a mouse, and explained what a window is. Plus the mail-ins.
Mid-90s (CD-ROM "multimedia machines") you got a sheet of paper which told you to load the interactive tutorial from the included CD.
Late 90s you got 5000 hours of AOL. Plus another CD filled with co-branded crapware like CorelDraw Lite for Dell.
2000s+ crapware pre-installed, driver CD and a warranty card.
So really, the time period with the included programming manual was just a few years. And mostly all you did is print Hello World over and over again on the screen. So don't be too jealous.
Now we get: {{ Fill in the Description }}
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storageb...
Until the early nineties, the compilers and interpreters from companies like Borland and Microsoft came with big excellent programming manuals demonstrating how to use them.
Also any complex commercial application for MS-DOS, e.g. AutoCAD, Lotus 1-2-3, the BRIEF editor for programmers etc., would have voluminous manuals, including sections on how to write scripts in whatever embedded scripting language they were using.
Only for the users of pirated copies of MS-DOS, compilers etc., the access to manuals was more difficult and some of them may have even not been aware of what manuals were normally available for the legitimate owners. Most IBM PC clones also did not have much documentation delivered with them. Since they were made to be compatible with IBM, it was supposed that anyone who needs them will buy the original IBM manuals.
Since Windows 95, the vendors of hardware PC peripherals have stopped providing documentation for them, providing closed-source Windows device drivers instead, but before that, whenever I was buying some PC add-on card, it typically came with a manual providing enough information about control registers etc., that I was able to write an MS-DOS device driver myself, if necessary.
Still, there’s something about Microsoft of that era. Bill Gates was “one of us,” a passionate nerd. This was an era where nerds like Jobs, Woz, and Gates ruled. The 1990s and the 2000s felt exciting, and it felt like technology was making the world a better place.
I must admit, even though I was firmly in the Jobs and Woz camp in the 2000s, I also fondly remember Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, and pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. Contrary to Steve Jobs’ opinion, I believe Microsoft has occasionally exhibited great taste :). For better or for worse, the 1990s was peak Microsoft.
Something happened in the 2010s. It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was.
Then again, I was a mere child in the 1990s, and I became an adult in the 2010s, and so I could be looking at the 1990s through childhood memories.
I do think the barrier to entry in tech has significantly increased. There was a wave of internet companies like Uber, (and their global equivalents) that benefited massively from providing local internet services. In the 2000s and 2010s the tech companies benefited massively from global poverty alleviation efforts to get users in remote regions on line. The push to get people online meant that millions of people in poor countries had access to social media and ads but not basic needs like toilets. As the tech companies saturated the emerging markets, covid began to hit. The stark inequalities began to be rubbed in. The big tech companies also dont really have any real material asset to fight over anymore. Their markets have been largely captured. As a big tech firm the game is now to maintain your lead. The industry is now run by MBAs, not hackers anymore.
I still remember how Microsoft, under Gates, acted like a robber baron to the whole tech community. You had a nice product? It was instantly copied by Microsoft, and they pulled the rug under you because they could.
You wanted open standards? It was a war purely because Microsoft wanted it to be. It was either Microsoft's way or the highway.
I consider pre-2008 and pre-iPhone launch to be the peak of the Internet, but it's all downhill from that year onwards.
The inflation factor is around 5X, so that's maybe $15k to $20k in modern money.
There were very few schools in the world with a five figure budget for computer experiments for a handful of pupils in the early 1970s.
Three letters: MBA
When the MBA's came into the tech industry everything got stale, 'safe' and unexciting as they want to leech their fucking hands over everything in the name of maximal profit.
Private Equity follows MBAs so you see more PE firms getting into tech during the same period. Same story, fucking leeches leeching makes the leeches happy at the expense of society. In fact, it seems PE firms and MBA grads love making the world an actively terrible place
I hate business bros. They ruin god damn everything.
Before posting this I feel it’s worth clarifying I didn’t take you to say you do hate them as people, please excuse the ramble.
Something that maybe one or two other dozen children had access to in the entire country during that time (60s/70s).
You have to also remember that computers were also seen as a public good for a large swath of users during this time too.
Makes you wonder how different this industry would be if we replaced Bill Gates singular childhood privilege with that of Bill Joy's (which looks like your typical middle class experience)? Only instead of one child, you could probably help thousands of children.
Something most professionals didn't even have.
You can write that, but I don't see it. FOSS is built for hacking, designed to empower and enable hacking. Proprietary closed-source software prevents it.
My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. They took over the office productivity software market by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly. Their initial and core success - getting DOS on IBM PCs, which led to the Windows monopoly - was simply leaping at a business opportunity, I think even before they began developing the product.
Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? Do you mind that they tried to destroy and monopolize the open web (thank you Mozilla!)?
So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening.
But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things.
If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly.
Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way.
Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?
IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened.
Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.
Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable.
Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.
Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users.
The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.
For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.
At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection -- Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at regular intervals.
IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.
I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.
That's just the way things were.
That's true, but that's not the only issue in system design. None were modern OSes.
Most of the rest I think is BS.
> IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.
Never heard that. What I always heard was that Netscape was the better browser but Microsoft used their Windows monopoly, again, to spread IE - which the US government also convicted them for.
> I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.
By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection?
Netscape was SO bad that they literally threw away all the code to make Firefox. Before IE3, Internet Explorer was not really competitive but with IE3 you could fully use it place of Netscape and it was smaller, faster, and more stable (it was also mostly Spyglass Mosaic). IE4 began the integration with Windows, all of which sucked and nobody used but the browser itself remained solid.
As a developer, IE was also way easier to develop for than Netscape and many things we now take for granted on the web were pioneered by Microsoft in IE. When the browser wars were on, IE was a really good browser and Netscape was stuck with a difficult code base. However, once Netscape was gone Microsoft simply stopped significantly updating IE. It remained almost completely stagnant until Chrome came along and it's from that period onwards that IE gets its bad reputation. I switched to Firefox at version 1.0 and still use it today.
The thing is that Microsoft did, in fact, bundle IE with Windows to try and kill Netscape but that doesn't imply IE was bad at the time. That's the flaw in the logic and where a lot of negative revisionist history comes from. Ironically, today, it would be considered crazy to sell an OS or device without a browser being bundled. And Netscape may have collapsed under it's own weight eventually anyway.
> By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection?
By some automated script over cable internet.
Nope. Netscape 4 did very well; that's one reason Microsoft used illegal means to compete. But Netscape, in what may be the textbook lesson about starting software projects over, tried to write Netscape 6 from a clean slate. It took much too long (of course) and wasn't released until Netscape was effectively dead.
AOL open-sourced Netscape's source code and from that was born Mozilla. Mozilla's first releases, based on Netscape 6, were Mozilla Suite or later Seamonkey. From what I know, they had generally superior browsers to IE - for example, they had tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and weren't the world's leading vector for attacks (it was before the Gates' Trustworthy Computing memo, which finally focused Microsoft on security).
Mozilla Suite included the browser, email, an HTML/webpage editor, and I think an IRC chat client. It also had seemingly every configuration option any contributor could think of. It was complex and impossible to develop and manage, and far exceeded user needs - most just wanted a web browser. So Mozilla made Firefox, just a web browser, along with the separate Thunderbird, just an email client.
I didn't say it didn't do well, I said it was a buggy bloated piece of crap. And it was. It was also the de facto way that many small businesses did both web browsing and email but the writing was on the wall. The price of browsers had fallen to zero.
It's weird arguing about history with someone who wasn't there. I was there. All this software you vague impressions of, I actually used. All of it. All versions of Netscape. All versions of IE (except 1). I still use Thunderbird for email.
The timeline you have in your head is sort of all over the place. By the time Firefox 1.0 was release IE was already on version 8 and had been around for a decade.
Firefox was a superior browser but realistically, at that time, browser security wasn't a huge problem. This was still the time of Flash plugins -- which all browsers supported -- but you still weren't p0wned the minute you browsed anywhere.
My feeling of IE3 to IE6 (at its release time) is that (anti-competitive strategies aside), many (most?) average consumers would very likely choose IE over Netscape if they gave both a bit of a test drive.
In 1996 (maybe 1997) I was 14/15 at the time and remember coming to the conclusion that IE3 ran much faster on Windows 95 compared to Netscape.
It being (anticompetitively) free helped, but on the 100Mhz Pentiums with 8MB of RAM in our computer lab, you’d be a masochist to choose Netscape over it for random web browsing.
IE4 was quite resource intensive, but because MS anticompetitively pre-loaded it on OS startup, it still started faster than Netscape.
IE6 I found pleasant to use and it wasn’t until Firefox came out with tabs (Opera had them earlier, but you would often encounter websites it wouldn’t render properly, probably due to IE targeted design), that IE lost its sheen for me.
Firefox was popular enough that developers started caring about standards compliant websites at which point IE started entering the “despised” category, but it may not have actually been displaced from its top spot were it not for Chrome.
I've never heard that and IIRC, DR-DOS's owners sued successfully (or DoJ sued successfully). People certainly saw the errors.
Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte.
DR DOS publisher Digital Research released a patch named "business update" in 1992 to bypass the AARD code.Well the article is obviously a biased source, but surely developing a) an ALTAIR emulator for PDP-10s (Allen) and b) a pretty much full-fledged BASIC interpreter that was exclusively tested on top of said emulator (Gates) in two months, in the 70s was not the kind of stuff an average coder would have done.
> How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read, they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.
Did you contradict yourself? Also, how do you measure "elite, exceptional, legendary"? Someone not qualifying for that wouldn't be a real coder in your book?
I think 'pure breed hacker' means much more than 'real coder' or 'can write competent 1980s-level production-quality code'.
It works both ways. It's hard to look back at the time while ignoring all the paths the road has taken since then.
Microsoft has always been company that is very good at building software compared their competition at the time. Their office productivity software, for example, is what made Windows popular (Windows is useless without apps). It's easy to give more weight to their flaws because, in many ways, their successes just seem obvious now.
I have never, ever heard that. (Edit: Name such software today.)
> Their office productivity software, for example, is what made Windows popular (Windows is useless without apps).
Completely false. Windows was already a monopoly, and the US government successfully sued Microsoft for using their Windows monopoly to leverage sales for Office. They told manufacturers: If you want Windows (which was essential) for the computer, you must pay for an Office license too.
Where do you get this stuff or why are you posting it?
The government lawsuit was specifically about Internet Explorer, not Office. At no time were manufacturers forced to pay for Office licenses. Go ahead, look it up, I'll wait.
Where do you get your stuff and why are posting it? You do know that Office applications existed before Windows, right? Excel came out for Mac OS first.
There was more than one government action back then - DR-DOS (maybe a private lawsuit), IE, Office, maybe others. It's possible Microsoft settled before anything was filed for the Office abuse, but there was government action on it.
> At no time were manufacturers forced to pay for Office licenses. Go ahead, look it up, I'll wait.
Do I work for you? What will you give me to look it up for you?
Why are you making this stuff up?
Also you: "Why are you making stuff up."
I lived through this entire time. You're right you don't work for me but if you're going to make wild claims you should back them up or not continue to post misinformation as fact.
I guarantee to you that there was never any government action (or even proposed action) against Microsoft for Office.
> if you're going to make wild claims you should back them up
Same goes for you.
I'm just going to preserve this claim here:
> I guarantee to you that there was never any government action (or even proposed action) against Microsoft for Office.
A guarantee! Can I sue if you're wrong? :)
1. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
If I could buy that kind of reputation by tossing a few coins into the void, why not? Especially after I've stolen billions from others.
Starts with "confirm plane reservation on Tue. Sept 2 or Wed. Sept 3" which is correct for 1975
I checked in a few places at the start and towards the end (the sin function) and they matched.
How was it then entered into the Altair? Did someone have to retype it? Or was there media that predated floppies that was used?
https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx
I expect it was distributed on tape as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#Origin_and_develo...
To me it felt consonant with the ethics of Harvard, and more saliently, the fact that their founding event was a lie seems consonant with the trajectory of the company. The summary of the book makes it sound like the real title is "A Glorious Life", and I would expect no contrition about DR DOS, Netscape, and other Microsoft ruthlessness under Gates.
(To be fair, I loathe Microsoft and their products, which help me accomplish my goals the way a spoon helps me cut a steak, and I have never seen Gates as virtuous. So I am hardly unbiased.)
Oracle did the same.
It's not fake, it's reality. And things have always has been this way.
How common do you think that story is? Over paying for software that doesn't actually make users more productive?
Microsoft things I think are pretty OK and don't really mind using:
Xbox, especially Game Pass; Azure; BASIC (particularly classic Microsoft BASICs and SmallBASIC)
Microsoft things that I think are not completely terrible and sometimes kind of useful:
Hyper-V; WSL; VSCode; C# and .NET; Visual BASIC; Excel and PowerPoint
Oh, MSFT ain't even "terrible" compared to some other players. Try Salesforce. Or ADP. Or even Atlassian. I can't believe we're actually paying money to use them and OMG, the software... I feel like when going to conferences, I'd be like that guy from the cigarettes ad in Idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzUcoZdfCOY ... "You work there? Fuck you!" :)
;-) I have never disliked MS games, or Xbox, or Game Pass.
I also dislike Teams, but Microsoft has integration, which means that it works with Outlook's calendar, with Office documents, etc. It's mediocre but full-featured.
I wonder what would have happened if Google Docs had evolved into a credible MS Office competitor? It's also amazing that Skype (and Hangouts/Meet for that matter) had such a head start over Zoom.
The reverse is also true: companies that are heavily invested in Google Workspace, GCP, and related tools are unlikely to switch to Office 365.
That said, there are exceptions. Legal professionals, for instance, often require the standard: Microsoft Word. And for advanced tasks, Google Sheets falls short of what Excel can do.
What strikes you as fake?
I do truly wonder if the fact that he was publishing a PDF as downloadable "code" even caused him any pause lol.
Git is for Linux and other cancers.
How do you think the likes of Delta and McDonalds manage their intranet and document storage? OneDrive is just a glorified SharePoint feature.
P.S. Joking only partially, and not much at all.
REAL windows enterprise companies worth their salt use a shared drive on \\global.
I must admit that while it's computationally quite wasteful, the web page does look quite neat.
Steve Jobs quote: "The problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste."
But I actually would prefer the pre-XP windows desktop to the flattened UIs of Apple's today.
As for the heaviness of the page… My 8 year old iPad loaded it just fine, so it couldn’t have been all that heavy.
I tried to view on a Windows 10 machine that's connected to a physical keyboard. In the scrolling on the mouse feels so laggy - you gotta wait for the animation to play before you can read.
I spent hardly a minute to read the top and then jumped back here to make this comment, which I never ever did before.
Perhaps a level of familiarity with the convention plays a role, as I have chanced upon the Long Now Foundation and some of its writings. Despite, that was a long time ago. There are competing conventions such as writing the year 2000 as 102000 so as to reflect a common estimate of the origin of our species, which I encountered via kurzgesagt.
I support the author’s rebuttal that if the slightly unusual year number prevents you from taking in the content and its points, you might just not be a member of the intended audience.
There’s no relationship between people who would appreciate the history the author was trying to communicate, and people who aren’t distracted by prefixing a pointless zero before the date.
Unless you really meant that as a snide comment calling GP an idiot.
Either way, maybe the zero prefixing thing is just stupid and not the hill to die on you seem to think it is.
(Anyone else remember 2004, how scared everyone was when the Windows 2000 source was leaked?)
See: Oracle v Google.
> Anyone else remember 2004
Remember John Ashcroft? The legal system was not as sophisticated then as it is now and juries were unlikely to penetrate even the basic issues of a case.
It should never be a requirement to enable JS to download a binary file like a PDF.
If you're concerned about scraping, put in a robots dot txt and/or give it to an entity like Internet Archive to host.
Maybe vomit. So many days lost trying to use Windows, Office and other "apps"[1] from Mictosoft.
[1] They were never able to write programs.
Allen wrote a loader (in machine code) for it on an aircraft flying down to sell it to Altair.
What ever you might say about them, they were not dim.
In the 1990s, during the competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, compared Bill Gates to Ginger Rogers. This analogy suggested that, like Rogers, who danced everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels, Gates was adept at following and adapting competitors' innovations. This comparison was part of Sun's broader critique of Microsoft's business practices at the time.
"It has been noted that everything Astaire did, Rogers was able to do -- backwards and in high heels. That's high praise for the nimble Ms. Rogers. But for a would-be visionary, following someone else's lead -- no matter how skillfully -- simply doesn't cut it."
https://web.archive.org/web/19991013082222/www.sun.com/dot-c...
I remember one investment bank I worked for, starting:
IT tech: Would you like a Sun workstation?
Me: Nope, I would like a top of range Windows PC, with two or more screens.
IT tech: Yeah, OK, all the traders say that too. We're throwing those Suns in the dumpster.
What's left of Sun is basically a startup founded by a few ex-employees, some open-source software, and the rest of their IP being milked by Larry Ellison.
They’re still out there. Maybe not visible to normal folks, but I know for a fact until very recently the Chicago Mercantile Exchange used their hardware in great quantities— maybe even as the underlying hardware for their matching engines, though I admit this is conjecture on my part. They don’t exactly let exchange customers in those rooms!
I miss their 10k & 15k chassis. Solid kit for their day.
The industry pretty quickly moved to incorporate basic in rom on many platforms and microsoft was able to capitalize on that integration through licensing. I don't think his letter did much other than antagonize hobbyists - but they made a lot licensing to the hardware manufacturers later on (and the hardware was truly more valuable with basic on board.
(One of my all time to this day favorite computers from that era is the TRS-80 Model 100. I don't remember if Microsoft provided the entire software stack for it, but I believe it was the last product that Bill Gates actually contributed to the software development.)
Both sources you link to say Allen and Gates pulled listings of the PDP-10 operating system out (probably DEC's TOPS-10?) of the trash. BASIC is not an operating system. So your claim is debunked by your own sources.
"...digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."
https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm
"...He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system..."
This is how the industry innovates
Xerox did later sue Apple for IP infringement, however most of their claims were dismissed[1].
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
[1] https://arlingtonmnnews.com/articles/bits-and-bytes/xerox-ve...
> [0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
I searched the cite for the 'share', '10', '22', 'sold, 'sell', 'bought', 'buy', 'purchase', and found nothing. ?
Exactly how and when Xerox disposed of its shares is not public record, but it's known to be around that timeframe and certainly Xerox made a profit. The book _Dealers of Lightning_ goes into more detail about the deal if you're interested[1].
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/why-your-computer-has-a-mous...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Light...
"r. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."
My understanding is that they saw the source implementation for other BASICs (on mainframes or whatever they were called at the time) but their code is mostly their own. Few if any programmers spring fully-formed from the head of zeus (although paul allen was close) and plenty of valuable intellectual property was originally created elsewhere.
See https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/