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!)?

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.

> This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.

It works both ways. It's hard to look back at the time while ignoring all the paths the road has taken since then.

Microsoft has always been company that is very good at building software compared their competition at the time. Their office productivity software, for example, is what made Windows popular (Windows is useless without apps). It's easy to give more weight to their flaws because, in many ways, their successes just seem obvious now.

> Was Gates especially proficient with code?

Well the article is obviously a biased source, but surely developing a) an ALTAIR emulator for PDP-10s (Allen) and b) a pretty much full-fledged BASIC interpreter that was exclusively tested on top of said emulator (Gates) in two months, in the 70s was not the kind of stuff an average coder would have done.

This also how I read the story, they were ‘basically’ salesmen/marketing guys with good investor storytime. The hacking part was hacking together code on the plane before the meeting to rake in the cash?

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.

Gates was obviously a proficient coder. I think you're experiencing a time compression phenomenon here: this was the mid 70s. Microsoft the big bad Microsoft that everyone knows about didn't appear until around the mid 90s. 20 years later, although from the perspective of 2025 those two eras seem pretty much adjacent.

BASIC was written as a team in Albuquerque. Altair had good reason to support their efforts. They then purchased DOS from Seattle Computer Products after they made a deal with IBM to sell it. To be fair Xerox gave away the office suite and the hardware to anyone who asked.