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Microsoft (and maybe even Bill Gates personally) generated a strong "dislike" sentiment to the hacker community. But we can't deny that he and Paul Allen were p

Microsoft (and maybe even Bill Gates personally) generated a strong "dislike" sentiment to the hacker community. But we can't deny that he and Paul Allen were pure breed hackers and helped a lot the development of technology. Of course, we all prefer OSS and we'd pick Linus (or insert OSS dev name here) 100 times over one of the "evil capitalists"/s, but nevertheless they have to be recognized.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
[flagged]
- hall0ween 2y ago
  I don’t have an opinion on the issue, cause it’s outta my wheelhouse. Well, aside from civility, which you need to work on.
- quickslowdown 2y ago
  This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM. I'm sure that helped its momentum in the corporate space, where it was already very present, but the whole family of Linux was very well established in servers, firewalls (more BSD than Linux here), mobile devices, embedded hardware, etc
  - skissane 2y ago
    > This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM. I’m not defending their overall argument, but I don’t think they are talking about the 2018 Red Hat acquisition, rather IBM’s 2000 announcement they were investing a billion dollars in Linux: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-to-spend-1-billion-on-linux-in-2001/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-to-spend-1-billi... IBM has been a big contributor to Linux long before buying Red Hat
- executesorder66 2y ago
  Yeah, corporations have the resources to do that kind of investment in Linux which random hobbiests don't. But why do they do it in the first place, instead of investing in their own obviously supiriour massively invested in OS's? Because Linux IS better, and the whole idea of it is better than some closed source crap. By nature of the GPL license it will snowball and everyone else will be left behind.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Meh, I don't prefer OSS. I prefer tools that work well, whatever they may be. For a long time, that was Windows. Microsoft went to hell, so now it's Linux. I'll happily use commercial solutions so long as they're good.
- muppetman 2y ago
  Yup! Which is why I use Linux but you better believe I've got Sublime Text installed (and licensed!)
- bigger_cheese 2y ago
  In "In the Beginning was the Command Line" Neal Stephenson used a car analogy to describe consumer operating systems, I always thought his analogy was pretty apt: To paraphrase him a little bit: Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network of dealerships with mechanics on staff. Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are expensive. Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from sophisticated space aged materials. The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...
russellbeattie 2y ago
Allen wrote an 8080 emulator on a time shared PDP-10 in order for Gates to write the assembly code that implemented a BASIC interpreter - complete with I/O and editor - for a sight-unseen system, all in 4 kilobytes. And it worked the first time it was run. I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays). Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies them as pure breed hackers to me.
- Seanambers 2y ago
  As a kid of the late 90s i feel like it was kinda unfair. Back in the day (70s(?)80s) computers shipped with the programming language manual. All I got was a CDROM of ENCARTA and a slip to mail in for a restore set of MS DOS / WIN 3.1 diskettes(which was sorely needed I might add).
  - russellbeattie 2y ago
    In the mid 70s you got a badly mimeographed copy of the schematics and a bag of parts. In the late 70s to early 80s you got a programming manual, but you had to save your programs on cassette tapes. In the late 80s, you got glossy manuals which showed you how to turn on the computer, hook up a printer and load a program from DOS. In the early 90s, the manuals were plain paper, smaller, and had instructions on how to use a mouse, and explained what a window is. Plus the mail-ins. Mid-90s (CD-ROM "multimedia machines") you got a sheet of paper which told you to load the interactive tutorial from the included CD. Late 90s you got 5000 hours of AOL. Plus another CD filled with co-branded crapware like CorelDraw Lite for Dell. 2000s+ crapware pre-installed, driver CD and a warranty card. So really, the time period with the included programming manual was just a few years. And mostly all you did is print Hello World over and over again on the screen. So don't be too jealous.
    - Joe_Cool 2y ago
      Yeah. At least you got a good MSDN CD in 1999 with tons of example code and all the info you'd want on Windows. Now we get: {{ Fill in the Description }} https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storagebuscache/?view=windowsserver2025-ps https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storageb...
linguae 2y ago
I’m a 90s kid (born in 1989), and I remember the days of the anti-trust lawsuit, “Internet Exploder,” the Slashdot Borg icon, and resentment from Mac users, WordPerfect users, Netscape users, and others who strongly disliked the Microsoft monopoly. Still, there’s something about Microsoft of that era. Bill Gates was “one of us,” a passionate nerd. This was an era where nerds like Jobs, Woz, and Gates ruled. The 1990s and the 2000s felt exciting, and it felt like technology was making the world a better place. I must admit, even though I was firmly in the Jobs and Woz camp in the 2000s, I also fondly remember Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, and pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. Contrary to Steve Jobs’ opinion, I believe Microsoft has occasionally exhibited great taste :). For better or for worse, the 1990s was peak Microsoft. Something happened in the 2010s. It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was. Then again, I was a mere child in the 1990s, and I became an adult in the 2010s, and so I could be looking at the 1990s through childhood memories.
- accurrent 2y ago
  As a fellow 90s kid... I feel the same. I remember when Sony Ericson launched their first camera phone and how we used to go through PC upgrades like crazy. My dad would go to the bookstore to buy magazines with new linux distros included for free. Now I have laptop thats 4 years old and Im not excited to buy my next (heck I dont even need to buy my next... I can run LLama.cpp just fine on my current). I do think the barrier to entry in tech has significantly increased. There was a wave of internet companies like Uber, (and their global equivalents) that benefited massively from providing local internet services. In the 2000s and 2010s the tech companies benefited massively from global poverty alleviation efforts to get users in remote regions on line. The push to get people online meant that millions of people in poor countries had access to social media and ads but not basic needs like toilets. As the tech companies saturated the emerging markets, covid began to hit. The stark inequalities began to be rubbed in. The big tech companies also dont really have any real material asset to fight over anymore. Their markets have been largely captured. As a big tech firm the game is now to maintain your lead. The industry is now run by MBAs, not hackers anymore.
marssaxman 2y ago
Gates showed his true colors right up front with the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", and pursued the rest of his career in like fashion. It's not just about Microsoft versus open source: many of us already resented their strong-arming, dominance-oriented, rent-seeking, ownership-hungry monopolistic approach to computing before the free software movement had really gotten going, or the term "open source" had even been invented.
- azemetre 2y ago
  It is interesting, especially in the context of Gates childhood upbringing and his extremely rare access to computers and computer training. Something that maybe one or two other dozen children had access to in the entire country during that time (60s/70s). You have to also remember that computers were also seen as a public good for a large swath of users during this time too. Makes you wonder how different this industry would be if we replaced Bill Gates singular childhood privilege with that of Bill Joy's (which looks like your typical middle class experience)? Only instead of one child, you could probably help thousands of children.
  - ForOldHack 2y ago
    Berkeley's Willard Jr high school bussed 7th grade student s up to Lawrence hall of science in the fall of 1970. I was the 3rd grade younger brother that started to print all the code, so I could walk through it. There were at least 70 to 80 kids there, and only two years later, they added two more 30 person labs. Dartmouth BASIC and HP basic were at most universities. While punched card FORTRAN was as most engineering schools.
    - azemetre 2y ago
      Yes, you're talking about getting access via public education. Bill Gates, as a child, had nearly 24/7 personal access to these machines. Something most professionals didn't even have.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  This is consistent with the parent comment. You can have a hacker mindset and be totally against open source. They are orthogonal qualities.
mmooss 2y ago
How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read, they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses. My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. They took over the office productivity software market by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly. Their initial and core success - getting DOS on IBM PCs, which led to the Windows monopoly - was simply leaping at a business opportunity, I think even before they began developing the product. Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? Do you mind that they tried to destroy and monopolize the open web (thank you Mozilla!)?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  And then all the folks that used to write M$ served the open Web in a plate to Google, now with the exception of Safari, what we have is ChromeOS, in browser, and being packaged in "native" apps.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- einr 2y ago
  My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening. But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things. If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly. Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way. Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
urbandw311er 2y ago
It’s also kind of difficult to hate on a guy that devoted his remaining decades to literally saving tens of thousands of lives around the world.
- devsda 2y ago
  Its possible. He is following the same tactics as when he was head of MS [1]. 1. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/ https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
- executesorder66 2y ago
  It's very easy to hate on him for that very reason. He's just buying a good reputation for the fraction of his wealth that is completely insignificant. If I could buy that kind of reputation by tossing a few coins into the void, why not? Especially after I've stolen billions from others.
jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
Yes, it's called pulling the ladder up behind you. I don't think "he was a hacker" mitigates anything whatsoever.
mmooss 2y ago
The pure breed hacker just published source code in a 100 MB PDF.

gjsman-1000 2y ago

[flagged]

hall0ween 2y ago
I don’t have an opinion on the issue, cause it’s outta my wheelhouse. Well, aside from civility, which you need to work on.
quickslowdown 2y ago
This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM. I'm sure that helped its momentum in the corporate space, where it was already very present, but the whole family of Linux was very well established in servers, firewalls (more BSD than Linux here), mobile devices, embedded hardware, etc
- skissane 2y ago
  > This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM. I’m not defending their overall argument, but I don’t think they are talking about the 2018 Red Hat acquisition, rather IBM’s 2000 announcement they were investing a billion dollars in Linux: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-to-spend-1-billion-on-linux-in-2001/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-to-spend-1-billi... IBM has been a big contributor to Linux long before buying Red Hat
executesorder66 2y ago
Yeah, corporations have the resources to do that kind of investment in Linux which random hobbiests don't. But why do they do it in the first place, instead of investing in their own obviously supiriour massively invested in OS's? Because Linux IS better, and the whole idea of it is better than some closed source crap. By nature of the GPL license it will snowball and everyone else will be left behind.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

Meh, I don't prefer OSS. I prefer tools that work well, whatever they may be. For a long time, that was Windows. Microsoft went to hell, so now it's Linux. I'll happily use commercial solutions so long as they're good.

muppetman 2y ago
Yup! Which is why I use Linux but you better believe I've got Sublime Text installed (and licensed!)
bigger_cheese 2y ago
In "In the Beginning was the Command Line" Neal Stephenson used a car analogy to describe consumer operating systems, I always thought his analogy was pretty apt: To paraphrase him a little bit: Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network of dealerships with mechanics on staff. Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are expensive. Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from sophisticated space aged materials. The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...

russellbeattie 2y ago

Allen wrote an 8080 emulator on a time shared PDP-10 in order for Gates to write the assembly code that implemented a BASIC interpreter - complete with I/O and editor - for a sight-unseen system, all in 4 kilobytes. And it worked the first time it was run. I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays). Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies them as pure breed hackers to me.

Seanambers 2y ago
As a kid of the late 90s i feel like it was kinda unfair. Back in the day (70s(?)80s) computers shipped with the programming language manual. All I got was a CDROM of ENCARTA and a slip to mail in for a restore set of MS DOS / WIN 3.1 diskettes(which was sorely needed I might add).
- russellbeattie 2y ago
  In the mid 70s you got a badly mimeographed copy of the schematics and a bag of parts. In the late 70s to early 80s you got a programming manual, but you had to save your programs on cassette tapes. In the late 80s, you got glossy manuals which showed you how to turn on the computer, hook up a printer and load a program from DOS. In the early 90s, the manuals were plain paper, smaller, and had instructions on how to use a mouse, and explained what a window is. Plus the mail-ins. Mid-90s (CD-ROM "multimedia machines") you got a sheet of paper which told you to load the interactive tutorial from the included CD. Late 90s you got 5000 hours of AOL. Plus another CD filled with co-branded crapware like CorelDraw Lite for Dell. 2000s+ crapware pre-installed, driver CD and a warranty card. So really, the time period with the included programming manual was just a few years. And mostly all you did is print Hello World over and over again on the screen. So don't be too jealous.
  - Joe_Cool 2y ago
    Yeah. At least you got a good MSDN CD in 1999 with tons of example code and all the info you'd want on Windows. Now we get: {{ Fill in the Description }} https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storagebuscache/?view=windowsserver2025-ps https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storageb...

linguae 2y ago

I’m a 90s kid (born in 1989), and I remember the days of the anti-trust lawsuit, “Internet Exploder,” the Slashdot Borg icon, and resentment from Mac users, WordPerfect users, Netscape users, and others who strongly disliked the Microsoft monopoly. Still, there’s something about Microsoft of that era. Bill Gates was “one of us,” a passionate nerd. This was an era where nerds like Jobs, Woz, and Gates ruled. The 1990s and the 2000s felt exciting, and it felt like technology was making the world a better place. I must admit, even though I was firmly in the Jobs and Woz camp in the 2000s, I also fondly remember Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, and pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. Contrary to Steve Jobs’ opinion, I believe Microsoft has occasionally exhibited great taste :). For better or for worse, the 1990s was peak Microsoft. Something happened in the 2010s. It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was. Then again, I was a mere child in the 1990s, and I became an adult in the 2010s, and so I could be looking at the 1990s through childhood memories.

accurrent 2y ago
As a fellow 90s kid... I feel the same. I remember when Sony Ericson launched their first camera phone and how we used to go through PC upgrades like crazy. My dad would go to the bookstore to buy magazines with new linux distros included for free. Now I have laptop thats 4 years old and Im not excited to buy my next (heck I dont even need to buy my next... I can run LLama.cpp just fine on my current). I do think the barrier to entry in tech has significantly increased. There was a wave of internet companies like Uber, (and their global equivalents) that benefited massively from providing local internet services. In the 2000s and 2010s the tech companies benefited massively from global poverty alleviation efforts to get users in remote regions on line. The push to get people online meant that millions of people in poor countries had access to social media and ads but not basic needs like toilets. As the tech companies saturated the emerging markets, covid began to hit. The stark inequalities began to be rubbed in. The big tech companies also dont really have any real material asset to fight over anymore. Their markets have been largely captured. As a big tech firm the game is now to maintain your lead. The industry is now run by MBAs, not hackers anymore.

marssaxman 2y ago

Gates showed his true colors right up front with the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", and pursued the rest of his career in like fashion. It's not just about Microsoft versus open source: many of us already resented their strong-arming, dominance-oriented, rent-seeking, ownership-hungry monopolistic approach to computing before the free software movement had really gotten going, or the term "open source" had even been invented.

azemetre 2y ago
It is interesting, especially in the context of Gates childhood upbringing and his extremely rare access to computers and computer training. Something that maybe one or two other dozen children had access to in the entire country during that time (60s/70s). You have to also remember that computers were also seen as a public good for a large swath of users during this time too. Makes you wonder how different this industry would be if we replaced Bill Gates singular childhood privilege with that of Bill Joy's (which looks like your typical middle class experience)? Only instead of one child, you could probably help thousands of children.
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  Berkeley's Willard Jr high school bussed 7th grade student s up to Lawrence hall of science in the fall of 1970. I was the 3rd grade younger brother that started to print all the code, so I could walk through it. There were at least 70 to 80 kids there, and only two years later, they added two more 30 person labs. Dartmouth BASIC and HP basic were at most universities. While punched card FORTRAN was as most engineering schools.
  - azemetre 2y ago
    Yes, you're talking about getting access via public education. Bill Gates, as a child, had nearly 24/7 personal access to these machines. Something most professionals didn't even have.
BeetleB 2y ago
This is consistent with the parent comment. You can have a hacker mindset and be totally against open source. They are orthogonal qualities.

mmooss 2y ago

How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read, they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses. My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. They took over the office productivity software market by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly. Their initial and core success - getting DOS on IBM PCs, which led to the Windows monopoly - was simply leaping at a business opportunity, I think even before they began developing the product. Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? Do you mind that they tried to destroy and monopolize the open web (thank you Mozilla!)?

pjmlp 2y ago
And then all the folks that used to write M$ served the open Web in a plate to Google, now with the exception of Safari, what we have is ChromeOS, in browser, and being packaged in "native" apps.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
einr 2y ago
My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening. But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things. If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly. Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way. Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.

urbandw311er 2y ago

It’s also kind of difficult to hate on a guy that devoted his remaining decades to literally saving tens of thousands of lives around the world.

devsda 2y ago
Its possible. He is following the same tactics as when he was head of MS [1]. 1. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/ https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
executesorder66 2y ago
It's very easy to hate on him for that very reason. He's just buying a good reputation for the fraction of his wealth that is completely insignificant. If I could buy that kind of reputation by tossing a few coins into the void, why not? Especially after I've stolen billions from others.

jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago

Yes, it's called pulling the ladder up behind you. I don't think "he was a hacker" mitigates anything whatsoever.

mmooss 2y ago

The pure breed hacker just published source code in a 100 MB PDF.