| ▲ | zabzonk a day ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gates and Allen wrote and copyrighted the first Microsoft Basic, and the Dec10 8080 emulator needed to run it (I've written one of these - a bit later as it happens). Allen wrote a loader (in machine code) for it on an aircraft flying down to sell it to Altair. What ever you might say about them, they were not dim. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | breadwinner a day ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
They were not dim, but Microsoft copied a lot, and didn't innovate. This aspect of Microsoft hasn't changed. In the 1990s, during the competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, compared Bill Gates to Ginger Rogers. This analogy suggested that, like Rogers, who danced everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels, Gates was adept at following and adapting competitors' innovations. This comparison was part of Sun's broader critique of Microsoft's business practices at the time. "It has been noted that everything Astaire did, Rogers was able to do -- backwards and in high heels. That's high praise for the nimble Ms. Rogers. But for a would-be visionary, following someone else's lead -- no matter how skillfully -- simply doesn't cut it." https://web.archive.org/web/19991013082222/www.sun.com/dot-c... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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