Comment by feketegy
8 days ago
I think what you are remembering is just nostalgia, people tend to remember the good things and shut out the bad ones.
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.
Yes, agree. Bill Gates was never ”one of us”. He came from extreme privilege and used his advantage to kill off much more innovative technologies. BeOS, anyone?
There's a throwaway quote about the school Gates was attending spending a few thousand dollars a year on a terminal and computer time.
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.
and?
To be fair, much of the coding community is highly educated - especially in the top companies, which generally hire from top schools - and therefore likely to be privileged.