> Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems.

Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.

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Nevermark 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The “strange” products they created to sell for money, were implementations of programming languages. When most software was (1) supplied by the large company that sold the large computer it ran on, (2) was written on one of those machines by the people who were going to use it, or (3) was hobby stuff, shared freely between hobbyists.

The latter made sense, since taking and giving back to the community was a natural and fair system. Which served everyone, while obligating no one. And in any case, how would you charge for something with no physical form and that anyone can copy?

	▲	fsckboy a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		what kept Microsoft alive in the post-BASIC pre-OS era was actually sales of the SoftCard, a hardware card which put a Z80 microprocessor into an Apple II so Apple owners could run CP/M software like S-100 machines. It was the brainchild of Paul Allen, and was about the biggest market share CP/M platform there was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard
	▲	ssrc a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Arguably this started in the mainframe world in 1969, with IBM "unbundling" software and services from hardware sales, after the US government launched an antitrust suit against them.

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homarp 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I understand this part to be more about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

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irishcoffee 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.

Imagine how different the world might be if gates’ mom didn’t work at ibm.

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zabzonk a day ago | parent | next [-]

she didn't. she was on a united way charity comittee with an ibm executive

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irishcoffee a day ago | parent [-]

Potato, po-tato?

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themadturk a day ago | parent [-]

Somewhat different, I think. She had no direct financial interest in IBM's decision; she convinced the guy at IBM to look at Bill for the PC's operating system. Sure, at that level favors and family can have a lot of influence, but there wasn't a direct business relationship.

	▲	irishcoffee a day ago \| parent [-]
		That’s fair. I never meant to imply a business relationship. I only meant the connections aspect. I should have made that more clear.

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GMoromisato a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't go down this road. It's so tempting to believe that everything is just luck and circumstance. It gives us an excuse to not bother trying. We all have that voice inside that seductively tells us that we don't need to try so hard; that it's all just luck, and we shouldn't waste our energy. This is the equivalent of refusing medical care because "God will provide."

I met Bill Gates a couple of times at Microsoft. He wasn't an average man who got lucky. He was/is a hard-working, extraordinarily brilliant man who got lucky.

I know the playing field is not level. We don't all have an equal chance to be a billionaire. But I do know that most of us have not reached our full potential. Most of us could be better (on whatever dimension you desire) if only we tried harder.

Imagine how different the world might be if we did.

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1718627440 a day ago | parent [-]

So what. The point is that you need to be hard-working and lucky. Neither alone suffices.

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yetihehe 21 hours ago | parent [-]

So what? "Hardworking" is a choice. You can choose to be hardworking or not. If you are already hardworking, then you can use your luck. If you're not, you will squander any chance.

	▲	17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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delaminator a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Or his dad at Planned Parenthood

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irishcoffee a day ago | parent [-]

Naw, that’s not nice. :(

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delaminator a day ago | parent [-]

Maybe you mis-understood. His dad was on the board of PP and it shaped Bill’s population control views and his “philanthropy”.

That’s not a maybe, he’s talked about it in interviews.

	▲	IAmBroom 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And you think that changed the world as much as founding Microsoft did?

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jameshart a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You missed the point. Selling an operating system at all was the innovation, rather than having it just come with the hardware. That the operating system they came up with the crazy idea to sell was someone else’s operating system is just an implementation detail, following the age old pattern of stealing others’ work industrialized decades earlier by Thomas Edison and thus requiring no innovation at all.

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fsckboy a day ago | parent [-]

CP/M was already for sale for years, and the PC DOS that Microsoft bought was modelled after CP/M

	▲	lproven a day ago \| parent [-]
		Good correction. This is the important point here. And there is a sub-point which is nearly as important: The 8086 was out there and selling for years. AT&T ported UNIX™ to it, meaning it was the first ever microprocessor to run Unix. But even so, DR didn't offer an 8086 OS, although it was the dominant OS vendor and people were calling for it. CP/M-86 was horribly horribly late -- it shipped after the IBM PC, it shipped about 3-4 years after the chip it was intended for. The thing is, that's common now, but late-1970s OSes were tiny simple things. Basically the story is that there was already an industry-standard OS. Intel shipped a newer, better, more powerful successor chip, which could run the same assembly-language code although it wasn't binary compatible. And the OS vendor sat on its hands, promising the OS was coming. IBM comes along, wanting to buy it or license it, but DR won't deal with them. It won't agree to IBM's harsh terms. It thinks it can play hardball with Big Blue. It can't. After waiting for a couple of years a kid at a small company selling 8086 processor boards just writes a clone of it, the hard way, directly in assembler (while CP/M was written in PL/M), using the existing filesystem of MS Disk BASIC, and puts it out there. MS snaps up a licence and sells it on to IBM. This deal is a success so MS buys the product. IBM ships its machine, with the MS OS on it. DR complains, gets added to the deal, and a year or so later it finally ships an 8086 version of its OS, which costs more and flops. The deal was very hard on Gary Kildall who was a brilliant man, but while MS exhibited shark-like behaviour, it was a cut-throat market, and DR needed to respond faster.