Where Microsoft's Profits Come From
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 12th Feb 2010 22:55 UTC
Microsoft Sometimes, the sheer size of a company like Microsoft can make it quite hard to see and realise just how large and profitable such a company can really be. In these kinds of situations, there's nothing like a clear graph to make all those pretty numbers tangible. Up to a point.
E-mail Print r 1   · Read More · 88 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/hnb
Thread beginning with comment 409240
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
nt_jerkface
Member since:
2009-08-26

Writing an interpreter is hard enough but even harder when you don't have access to the hardware. Bill Gates wrote most of BASIC for the Altair on paper and then tested it in an emulator that Allen created. It took a lot of work and was a huge gamble. Sure it wasn't like the Woz who put together a computer in his garage but it was impressive for the time.

Edited 2010-02-14 00:32 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 1

tomcat Member since:
2006-01-06

Writing an interpreter is hard enough but even harder when you don't have access to the hardware. Bill Gates wrote most of BASIC for the Altair on paper and then tested it in an emulator that Allen created. It took a lot of work and was a huge gamble. Sure it wasn't like the Woz who put together a computer in his garage but it was impressive for the time.


You're right, but none of these people will ever acknowledge that anything Gates did was innovative, because they simply hate him to the core. They hate that he outmaneuvered them. They hate that Windows is the dominant desktop operating system. They hate that they can't give away Linux for free, and take market share. They hate that people charge money for software.

Reply Parent Score: 2

Kroc Member since:
2005-11-10

When I was 12 I was writing assembly on paper and bitmaps on graph paper (calculating the bytes manually). This was common with the Commodore 64 and earlier computers. What Bill did was good, but he had an education and a lot of years on me, but I could have done the same in the same situation. Tron was animated on graph paper, this sort of thing is familiar to me—it really was manual before the first IDEs came into being.

Reply Parent Score: 1

nt_jerkface Member since:
2009-08-26

Oh give me a break, what do you think his education was in?

It wasn't as if there was a class available on how to write a Basic interpreter for the Altair and keep it under 4k.

I don't see any programs on your website so why should I assume you could have done the same? Is it really that hard to accept that Bill Gates was a good programmer in his time?

Reply Parent Score: 2