Comment by curiousObject
7 hours ago
>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.”
Imagine if the University had sued for their share of the IP and that was created using their resources…
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.
In the case of Microsoft, I'm not seeing it.
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.
See also Airbnb and Uber.