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Don't suppose being born into a family with self-created wealth (lawyer father, board member mother, bank president grandaddy) had anything to do with developin

Don't suppose being born into a family with self-created wealth (lawyer father, board member mother, bank president grandaddy) had anything to do with developing the business acumen required to make money from "hacking." Anyway, we all know it was the exclusivity agreements Microsoft managed that made them rich, not the quality of their hackerdom.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
As Malcolm Gladwell has recently highlighted: Of course Gates' family wealth helped him become a better hacker. That's how he got all that computing experience in high school. Before the invention of the microcomputer, far fewer high school students had access to computers. (I'm younger than Gates, but I do remember computer scarcity: I was among the last generation to experience it. In middle school, having gotten bored with BASIC, I taught myself Pascal from books, but I didn't get ahold of a compiler until three years later.) But Microsoft's early success in dominating the microcomputer language market was not built on "exclusivity agreements" -- it was built on Gates and Allen's software skills, which allowed them to hit the microcomputer market early (before the Altair even shipped, in fact!) and then to hold their market position by porting their products to a lot of different systems as they came out. And if Microsoft hadn't cornered the language market on a range of early microcomputer systems, there would have been no reason for IBM to approach Bill Gates with that fateful agreement that brought the company into the OS business.
- aswanson 18y ago
  the scarcity I recall it all too well, and it seriously damaged my development. I mastered BASIC during the Commodore Christmas of 85. Years later in 11th grade, my high school was teaching...BASIC...on Trash-80s. I thought for a while, what is the fuss about computers for? They haven't moved forward in years and speak a crap language. I'm done with these toys.

mechanical_fish 18y ago

As Malcolm Gladwell has recently highlighted: Of course Gates' family wealth helped him become a better hacker. That's how he got all that computing experience in high school. Before the invention of the microcomputer, far fewer high school students had access to computers. (I'm younger than Gates, but I do remember computer scarcity: I was among the last generation to experience it. In middle school, having gotten bored with BASIC, I taught myself Pascal from books, but I didn't get ahold of a compiler until three years later.) But Microsoft's early success in dominating the microcomputer language market was not built on "exclusivity agreements" -- it was built on Gates and Allen's software skills, which allowed them to hit the microcomputer market early (before the Altair even shipped, in fact!) and then to hold their market position by porting their products to a lot of different systems as they came out. And if Microsoft hadn't cornered the language market on a range of early microcomputer systems, there would have been no reason for IBM to approach Bill Gates with that fateful agreement that brought the company into the OS business.

aswanson 18y ago
the scarcity I recall it all too well, and it seriously damaged my development. I mastered BASIC during the Commodore Christmas of 85. Years later in 11th grade, my high school was teaching...BASIC...on Trash-80s. I thought for a while, what is the fuss about computers for? They haven't moved forward in years and speak a crap language. I'm done with these toys.