Comment by zabzonk
9 days ago
Gates and Allen wrote and copyrighted the first Microsoft Basic, and the Dec10 8080 emulator needed to run it (I've written one of these - a bit later as it happens).
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.
They were not dim, but Microsoft copied a lot, and didn't innovate. This aspect of Microsoft hasn't changed.
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...
Yes, well Scott McNealy will never be my idea of a brilliant man. Or Sun of a particularly good company - where are they now?
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.
Sun made incredibly good hardware and software. They were incredibly good technologists, responsible for lots of innovations, but they were bad at business. So in that sense they were the opposite of Microsoft.
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Just yesterday I personally witnessed pallets of Sun/Oracle equipment being unloaded. I’ll admit, it made me nostalgic!
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 spiritual successor for Sun machines is Oxide (lots of ex-Sun folks). And Sun got acquired by Oracle so it’s still technically around on the software side via virtual box and Java.
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And I should of said (and did say) "With a Kingfisher X server installed and configured"
"This aspect of Microsoft hasn't changed." Now that is quite a dig, but I am going to have to completely agree, until they got Coulter but after that it is pretty much Microshaft.
Seems that Ginger got the last laugh though.