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The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates (2004)
- wglb 17y agoAn old article, but full of lessons. What seems to be less often known about Kildall is that his thesis was about writing optimizing compilers, and he is was the author of PL/M, a language loosely based on XPL, a language designed as a tutorial for compiler construction.
- mynameishere 17y agoShit happens. Seriously, the guy was a big success by any measure, except the measure that comes with comparing yourself with Bill Gates. No reason to hit the bottle, if you ask me.
- seldo 17y agoThe triumph of DOS was the licensing, not the technology itself; that's what made Bill Gates so rich. Even by contemporary standards MS-DOS was a half-assed operating system full of design flaws. Saying that Kildall made a much better operating system misses the point. The operating system is not what made the money; Gates could have sold practically any OS with his licensing deal and made the same fortune. He literally sold the license before he even owned DOS.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- rms 17y agoThis is the full length-version of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624887 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624887, which contains no different information. It seems likely that the other story is copied from this Business Week article without attribution for compilation among other short stories about business for an ebook.