I cannot describe to you how jealous I am of the fact that back then writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company.
Yes, but that assembly was not DOS, and it wasn’t easy.
Microsoft purchased the DOS code, they didn’t write it. Of course, they did develop and modify DOS. But that was a clever (and lucky) business deal, not a technological accomplishment.
The real beginning of Microsoft was earlier, with Allen, Gates and Davidoff writing the Altair BASIC interpreter. That was a serious achievement.
They had never seen the computer they were writing that assembly code for. They did not even own any computers. It took them 8 weeks on a university computer they were not supposed to be using for that
“Altair agreed to meet them to possibly buy a BASIC interpreter… Gates and Allen had neither a BASIC interpreter nor even an Altair system on which to develop and test one. However, Allen had written an Intel 8008 emulator that ran on a PDP-10 time-sharing computer. Allen adapted this emulator based on the Altair programmer guide, and they developed and tested the interpreter on Harvard's PDP-10.
The finished interpreter, including its own I/O system and line editor, fit in only four kilobytes of memory, leaving plenty of room for the interpreted program. In preparation for the demo, they stored the finished interpreter on a punched tape that the Altair could read, and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque to meet with Altair…
While on final approach into the Albuquerque airport, Allen realized that they had forgotten to write a bootloader to read the tape into memory. Writing in 8080 machine language, Allen finished the program before the plane landed. Only when they loaded the program onto an Altair and saw a prompt asking for the system's memory size did Gates and Allen know that their interpreter worked on the Altair hardware.”
It’s funny because I thought Jobs/Wozinak got their initial funding from selling phreaking boxes. And more recently, Anthropic engaged in criminal copyright violations with only a slap on the wrist.
Feels like a common theme of every “great” company having its origins from a “boost” resulting from criminal activity. (After all, that’s where the money is!)
Just imagine the criminal penalties possible for pirating and selling one copy of a movie or making one long distance phone call with phreaking.
Being born into a 1% household and understanding the asymmetric upside that having the money and the time to speculate is far more significant than the civil and criminal legal violations on the way.
The most common way to go from one-percenter rich to .001% rich is to already have enough wealthy people generating capital in your personal network that you can raise capital on sweetheart terms to buy the labor of people who don't.
Then you sell it at a massive premium and repeat.
I think it's empirically dubious to identify the UW mainframes as the secret sauce instead of "being able to ask your mom for a meeting with the chairman of IBM followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP."
If the original creators of DOS were born into a wealthy family and on a first name basis with the chairman of IBM, do you think they would've sold it to Gates?
Trying to attribute the tech business "founding crime" feels like displacement for what is perfectly legal and accepted cultural practice.
But unfortunately there are still plenty of useful idiots, the same kind that propped up Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin.
How many have democracies killed?
It’s not like-for-like but how do we compare?
Are people that broken nowadays?
boo hoo I dont have the new iphone the moment it release.
Bish I was on PS1 until 2004.
Ask East Germans, Poland, Lithuania, Lativa, Estonia etc if communism or capitalism is better. I'll wait. :)
The Chinese tried communism. It worked far better for them than what they had before.
No, it was not better. Quite objectively.
Even just looking at the industrial growth rates, the socialistic economy of the USSR was inferior to many capitalistic economies starting from the same base. E.g. South Korea or Japan.
Your data about life expectancy is also plainly wrong: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN?locat...
Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism.
Why? I absolutely can. DPRK vs South Korea is an even better example.
> Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism.
Well, duh. And capitalism _swiftly_ outpaced the previous rate. As somebody who experienced Soviet dentistry and medicine first-hand, I'm not at all surprised.
DPRK is a chinese buffer state run by a cult of personality where South Korea is a strategic allied US country. Like yes I too would take South Korea’s position? It has nothing to do with capitalism.
Did it? Doesn’t look too swift to me. Also why not compare Chinese life expectancy now to before communism? Looks pretty good.
Say before tractors it took 100 men to farm enough for 1000 people.
With tractors 20 men can farm for 1000.
With automation 1 man can farm for 1000 if not significantly more.
Open Source Robo Communism is the way to go imo. Sure a handful of engineers have to maintain the robots, and build new ones. And a few jobs will remain human only.
But we could easily get to 80% of the population being free to make art and dance
What's the percentage here?
That's why going to an elite school is such a lifeline for people from bottom quartile backgrounds. Getting the opportunity socialize with people born at the top and be treated as a peer in an institutional environment is invaluable. That alone is worth the price of admission.
It doesn't have to be your parents, but it has to be someone with money who already knows you, trusts you, and feels like you identify with them and their interests.
Of course, you could also work your way up slowly and prove your mettle through decades of dedicated service to your employer. But I'm not sure how you'd be able to build that long track record of likability and trust to be able to raise millions based on work history when that entire history is a 3 month internship.
One can't even blame the VCs. If you're investing in things that are often partially fraudulent by design...
...do you want the getaway driver for the pump-and-dump to be a family friend you've known a long time, or a stranger that might not be a good "culture fit" for what the valuation game often becomes?
I mean, we can blame them from systematically investing in things fraudulent by design.
I mean, rich kid fuckup still end up pretty good, unless they are full on addicts who committed robbery. And even then they get much better and qualified defense layer - ending with much lower punishment. But normally, they get a pretty good job through parents network and somehow muddle through.
> CEOs with poor backgrounds.
Statistically, upward mobility is low these days, people stay where they are born. So, I think that statistically there are not that many of those.
What real life example is this from?
None actually, because I didn't recall the original amount correctly and I failed to correct for inflation, and Microsoft was already doing pretty well at that point. That was inaccurate to say.
It does make you think, though. If you too are able to work hard and build an operating system or save up six figures corrected for inflation, that still doesn't get you anything. What you really need is for your mother to be a good friend and socio-economic equal of chair of IBM.
They sold their shares in 2005
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-02-fi-calbr...
I'm sure his family connections aided him significantly.
"Beyond the Seattle area, Gates [Bill's mother] was appointed to the board of directors of the national United Way in 1980, becoming the first woman to lead it in 1983. Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates
It's as if your mother now was at the board of NVIDIA (because IBM then was quite the powerhouse). Sure, you still need to write "a few thousands lines of assembly" or equivalent... or find someone else who would, but you still need the connection to sell "it".
So... is your mom at such a famous board? Actually ANY board? If not you might have to write a LOT more and still a successful software company, sorry.
Loser today, you would have been a loser back then too.