[OT] Linda McQuaig on Bill Gates

[Thomas Milne]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 8:34 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
<clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 03/22/2011 08:18 PM, James Knott 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.
>
> I also heard that he tore the labels off mattresses, jaywalked, and mixed
> colours with whites in the wash.

Okay, he never murdered anyone...but the billions of dollars that he
has amassed and hero status are not deserved, which is the point of
all this. He cannot claim to be a 'self-made man' or that he was the
progenitor of the home PC revolution.

I've never put much stock in the whole 'great man' theory of history
anyway. Even someone like Einstein had to base his ideas on the
thousands of years of scientific progress before him.

-- 
TBM
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