3 ms·

What a great interview. Say what you will about Microsoft, Bill Gates is a smart, smart man. There are so many great quotes in there. Considering the time the

What a great interview. Say what you will about Microsoft, Bill Gates is a smart, smart man. There are so many great quotes in there. Considering the time the interview took place, he did a great job of anticipating what was coming: * transition of interesting jobs from hardware -> software * user experience becoming more important than performance * the importance of networking Well worth the read. I was about 2 months old when DOS came out. Can't imagine where I'd be without the PC revolution.

pornel 15y ago
> Can't imagine where I'd be without the PC revolution. Probably it wouldn't be much different. The revolution would have happened anyway, but with Apple, Atari, Amiga or someone else. And perhaps multitasking GUI OSes would be mainstream 5-10 years earlier ;)
- kenjackson 15y ago
  BUT, a big thing in favor of MS is that DOS/Windows didn't sit on proprietary HW. Apple/Atari/Commodore were all proprietary systems. I'm not sure if we would have seen the rapid rise of video cards in any of those systems. Hindsight is 20/20, but all things considered I think the tech world is in a pretty good place today.
  - pornel 15y ago
    IBM PC was proprietary as well. "IBM PC-compatible" clones with reverse-engineered BIOS were made despite IBM, not thanks to them.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      But the OS was licensed to IBM. MS could sell it to any HW vendor. The HW, with respect to the OS, wasn't proprietary. The MacOS wasn't simply licensed to run on Macs, it was built by Apple to only run on Macs. Despite some toe dips, there never any attempt to really license it. The mistake IBM made wasn't the HW. It was that they let MS license them the OS on a non-exclusive basis. A genius move when you consider it -- most people would have had little belief there'd be a huge MS-DOS market once IBM entered the fold.

pornel 15y ago

> Can't imagine where I'd be without the PC revolution. Probably it wouldn't be much different. The revolution would have happened anyway, but with Apple, Atari, Amiga or someone else. And perhaps multitasking GUI OSes would be mainstream 5-10 years earlier ;)

kenjackson 15y ago
BUT, a big thing in favor of MS is that DOS/Windows didn't sit on proprietary HW. Apple/Atari/Commodore were all proprietary systems. I'm not sure if we would have seen the rapid rise of video cards in any of those systems. Hindsight is 20/20, but all things considered I think the tech world is in a pretty good place today.
- pornel 15y ago
  IBM PC was proprietary as well. "IBM PC-compatible" clones with reverse-engineered BIOS were made despite IBM, not thanks to them.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    But the OS was licensed to IBM. MS could sell it to any HW vendor. The HW, with respect to the OS, wasn't proprietary. The MacOS wasn't simply licensed to run on Macs, it was built by Apple to only run on Macs. Despite some toe dips, there never any attempt to really license it. The mistake IBM made wasn't the HW. It was that they let MS license them the OS on a non-exclusive basis. A genius move when you consider it -- most people would have had little belief there'd be a huge MS-DOS market once IBM entered the fold.