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The PC revolution owes its greatest debt not to Gates, but to Kildall, in terms of individual contribution. It may well be that Gates was driven to purposeful
by vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The PC revolution owes its greatest debt not to Gates, but to Kildall, in terms of individual contribution.
It may well be that Gates was driven to purposeful action from a love of computers. That he has had no notable productivity since Altair BASIC (other than third-party accounts of him doing code reviews early at Microsoft), nor any research, would nevertheless make his contributions to the field quite little.
- drumdance 11y ago"Code reviews" makes it sound like something he did for 15 minutes as part of a standup. He was known to be incredibly sharp, asking extremely detailed questions. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html "Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer." Edit: My point is, one can love computers and be very good at them without making significant contributions to the field. That describes me and probably most of the people on HN.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoOf course you can. The fact remains that Bill Gates has not been associated with any directly technical work in decades, so his action in the distant past is of little relevance to his action in the less distant past and the present, and moreover is irrelevant to the GP's assertion of his familial wealth.