[OT] Linda McQuaig on Bill Gates

[Thomas Milne]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 8:18 PM, James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Thomas Milne wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 7:42 PM, Stephen<stephen-d-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>  wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On 11-03-22 07:35 PM, Thomas Milne wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I've been reading The Trouble with Billionaires by Linda McQuaig and
>>>> she includes a section on Bill Gates. I had never read any of the
>>>> history of Bill Gates and CP/M and Gary Kildall. Definitely a story
>>>> worth looking up, I can't believe how much of Bill Gates' success is
>>>> based on the work of others. Pretty much _all_ of it. According to
>>>> McQuaig, under todays copyright and patent rules, Gates would have had
>>>> a very different experience.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Has Microsoft ever been innovative?
>>>
>>> Once you get past the paper clip, Bob, and the blue screen of death, it
>>> is
>>> pretty tough to credit Microsoft with any innovation at all.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Exactly, I knew he had been accused of being a thief, but I had no
>> idea how far back it went. From day one his is a story of privilege
>> and luck. He even went to what was probably the first school in the
>> world that had its own PC...his hand was held every step of the way by
>> his mommy and her connections.
>>
>>
>
> Did she mention how he used the Harvard computers to develop BASIC for the
> Altair 8800, even though those computers were not supposed to be used for
> commercial purposes?  Or how he used to dumpster dive for code written by
> others.
>

She did not get that specific, but she made a point that he based a
lot of his work on machines like those at Harvard that came from
public funding.


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