On Sat, 2009-08-08 at 09:17 -0600, Robert Lewko wrote: > Yeah, OK a talented programmer. Yeah he was working on Basic. > Whoopee!!! I'm no fanboi but you do need to factor in a couple of things... - He did scratch write a Basic interpreter. Before you blow that off as no big deal, try it. Now try it again in 4K. I've done parallel work - that's difficult now, it was *hard* then. - I don't know many CEOs that do a whole lot of coding - their responsibilities have changed.
I couldn't find an employee head-count for 1975 - when BG & Paul Allen released basic. In 1976 MS had 6 employees. I did find that by 1993 - first release of NT - MS had over 14,000 employees - by this time Bills coding days were long behind him. > > Then how is it that when this "talented programmer" gets into the > position of chief architect that he hires David cutler, who was fired > from DEC for incompetence, to architect NT? Then because the > performance of NT 3.51 sucked so bad he hires people to cut the normal > protections of a Multiprocessing OS out to create NT 4.00. He was > having such a hard time with the debugging he gets Nathan Myrvold > involved who promises to help get it degugged, which he does. > > My point is that through this episode, he sneers at the almost 30 > years of computing wisdom and in the process creates a piece of > technological drek, which we are stuck with today as the majority OS > on the planet. And you want me to acknowledge that man for being a > wizard and a visionary?! Sorry No!!! > > > On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Gustin Johnson <[email protected]> > wrote: > Robert Lewko wrote: > > Thank you for that acknowledgement. > > > > I would like to add that what also added to M$'s success > was the > > incredibly inept marketing of others and the stupid UNIX > wars of the mid > > 80's and early 90's. If Apple, Xerox and IBM had not been > so steeped in > > the paradigm of the era (mainframes) and could have seen the > > consequences of hardware becoming cheaper by the day almost > (commonly > > known as Moore's Law) then they may have been able to make > something > > come of the technologies that they had in the 1980 period. > > Say what you will about MS, they are one of the few big tech > companies > to have not made a fatal mistake. At least not yet. Anyone > remember > the Wordstar wars? You know two competing products from the > same > company that even had similar names. > > Anyone remember Borlund? > > <snip> > > > All the stuff about BG being some technological whiz and a > visionary is > > bullshit!!! > > Actually BG was a talented programmer back in the day. He may > not be an > industry prophet, and he may not play by the rules, but at > least get the > history straight. > > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
