Whatever your opinion of Microsoft, their influence and history is an incredible one.

BBC News.

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@A1200

From BBC article:

Quote:

His Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said: "I am heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends... Personal computing would not have existed without him."

Revisionist history at its best! I think what dear Bill meant to say was that the Wintel monopoly and the 'PC Master Race' would not have existed without him.

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@A1200

Sure, late 80s, early 90s I would advise everybody against getting some Windows / Microsoft machine and get an Amiga instead. Now, I don't see any reason why to fork out extra money for a fruitmachine or doing the Linux way.

Oh and I think that I spent a big portion of my active Amiga-days with one of the Microsoft offers on Workbench 1.3: AmigaBASIC.

So Microsoft fanboy or not, I think Allen and Gates sure had their positive influence on sculpting the computer landscape we're in to day.

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@Amiga_3k

Positive?

Without Microsoft we would have been much further along, they have always been the ones to delay all standardisation processes in all kinds of creative ways. And still are.

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@BigD

That's funny as I was thinking along the same lines. Personal computing? PC? I think we would have survived fine. We had all the great micros from the 80's. We were happy. Hey, I recall some school assignment or something vaguely, where I had to think about what I'd would do in retirement. And I was thinking about what projects I'd be doing on my C16. Just as well the Amiga came along!

@Hypex

Quote:

We had all the great micros from the 80's.

And what pretty much all of em had common? Microsoft basic.

People tend to forget that Microsoft existed before IBM PC. Microsoft released Altair basic 14 July 1978.

@kolla

How so?
Their leading industry apis that actually define hardware paths that dont exist yet (ie. theyre ahead of the game) ?
Or the standards that there not actually involved in and can't have any sort of influence in (jedec for eg.) ?

Or something else?
Anything?

@kolla

Quote:

Without Microsoft we would have been much further along...

Without commenting on the second part of your sentence, I'm not sure this is true. Several people have already pointed out the various BASIC's that Microsoft brought to light, and which were usually high-quality.

But I'd like to point out that Microsoft was one of the major players who managed to free business computing from IBM. That was no small affair.

The reason players like Apple, Atari, and Commodore withered away in the 80s, with only Apple surviving, had a lot more to do with the fact that the PC started off with 3 important letters on its cover that no other product thad: I, B, and M. IBM lost control in large part because Microsoft was willing to sell their software to other vendors, and also because they (IBM) had made the system open enough that companies like Compaq could make clones. The PS/2, and OS/2, failed largely because IBM tried to keep it their personal, closed monopoly.

MSDOS was pretty inferior to most of the competition, as was Windows for a long time. Unfortunately, it did just enough of what people needed. In particular, they maintained backward compatibility.

Sort of like C and C++: in many respects, they're terrible languages to learn and use for computer programming. But they do just enough of what people need, such as maintaining a large amount of backward compatibility.

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@simplex

The fact that there was professional market and home market gave mismanaged companies like Commodore a fighting chance.

Microsoft forced IBM to compete on the low end market where Amiga computers and Atari systems where competing, Apple computers where expensive back then too.

Extreme competition & standardization killed companies that wonted to be different.
Competition forced prices down, and forced innovation on PC graphic cards, memory, hd controllers, all the invocation was on PC; Amiga was glued to old hardware design, and in many cases a lack of a hardware abstraction, that resulted in lack of innovation.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 16-Oct-2018 at 11:08 PM.

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@simplex

Pascal was right in between Basic and C, it as perfect language for beginners and engines, sadly broadland changed name, and every one forgot about Pascal. and they might been pushe out by MS, as MS controlled the most common OS, and the most common OS API.

and in defense of C/C++, most operating system drivers and really preference critical task is written in C/C++.

Personally I think MS VB, stuff is slow and resource hungry, think like MS office can some times be like working with glue, if exported some large reports from one of this so common modern web based applications (economy systems, support systems, etc). yes I know you should be working with databases working large datasetts, but that option is not all ways available to the end user.

Often company's make bad choices when picking system, basing there chooses on minimum requirement and price.

You are right in one thing "Rapid development tools" that helps developers quickly find bug, fix bug and optimize code, has its advantages and this what Microsoft is good at with there Visual Studio. but it not a requirement to write software, there lots good open source software written with just normal text editor like VIM and a compiler, run time engine.

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@kolla
Quote:

they have always been the ones to delay all standardisation processes in all kinds of creative ways

That's one way to look at it. You could also see that their financial success pushed forward standardisation, as IBM-compatible PCs became the defacto standard. The combined success of Microsoft and Intel led to many hardware standards.

Also, as much as you may dislike MS-DOS or Windows, as Rose pointed out the history of Microsoft predates all of that. They were responsible for one of the first "killer apps" for the first commercially available PCs, as they developed Altair BASIC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

Even if their only contribution was to help popularise BASIC, they'd still have a key part to play in the emergence of the home computer market.

@NutsAboutAmiga
Quote:

Pascal was right in between Basic and C, it as perfect language for beginners and engines, sadly broadland changed name, and every one forgot about Pascal. and they might been pushe out by MS, as MS controlled the most common OS, and the most common OS API.

If you look at the history of Pascal-derived or Pascal-inspired languages, its legacy definitely lives on.

For example, Turbo Pascal led to Delphi, which is still under development (the latest release was made a a few months ago) :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(IDE)#Embarcadero_Delphi_10.2_Tokyo

Also, the author/chief architect of Turbo Pascal and Delphi was Anders Hejlsberg, who went on to work at Microsoft, where he became the lead architect of C# :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: Without Microsoft we would have been much further along, they have always been the ones to delay all standardisation processes in all kinds of creative ways. And still are.

I believe you're stuck in the nineties because Google is the new Microsoft of today

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@Rose

Quote:

And what pretty much all of em had common? Microsoft basic.

Yes they did. If you even knew what Microsoft was. Back then I didn't know what a Microsoft was.

However, you remind me of another confusion here, about MS BASIC. With some people thinking Gates invented BASIC. Because MS BASIC was a widely used version.

But Gates didn't invent BASIC. I can't even remember the three names involved that did invent BASIC. I l know they have started passing away.

So how come they remain relative unknowns? Did they write their own commercial version they could have ported to many platforms? Did they benefit from it as much as they should have? Financial and otherwise. We know Gates did.

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: So how come they remain relative unknowns? Did they write their own commercial version they could have ported to many platforms? Did they benefit from it as much as they should have? Financial and otherwise. We know Gates did.

How many language inventors that made their own commercial version have become rich from it? I cannot think of anyone, is there any?

@Hypex
I've seen and heard a lot of crazy stuff over the years but never anything like that.
They created a type of standard of BASIC with some level of compatibility on a lot of different computers and they made it easier for home computer manufacturers to deliver a product.

Microsoft have a done a lot for the computer world, both good and bad.

The original Darthmouth BASIC was created in the 60's. The creators sold misc. versions of BASIC one derivative that is still for sale today (don't remember the name). What Microsoft did was cut down the language into something that usable on the small memory home computer systems available back then. So ordinary people with an interest in computers could learn and program in a "high" level language instead of a machine code monitor - and that was important.

: BUT... ." FORTH WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER" CR ;
BUT...

Last edited by megol on 17-Oct-2018 at 08:03 PM.

@Thread





How old was Gates when he met Allen? Was this a Marty McFly / Doc Brown type relationship but with a 30 year old befriending a 13 year old?

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

Pascal was right in between Basic and C, it as perfect language for beginners and engines, sadly broadland changed name, and every one forgot about Pascal. and they might been pushe out by MS, as MS controlled the most common OS, and the most common OS API.

I was studying in school when Pascal was slowly being forced out in favor of other languages. Part of the reason was that C had become an academia and industry standard: in academia because of Unix, and then the students who learned in C went on to work in industry & wanted to keep using it. Once you get a sizable software base, it doesn't matter how inferior a platform is; you're stuck with it. No one wants to switch to new stuff. That's how Windows came to dominate, after all.

A lot of new languages, such as Nim, are getting around that by compiling to C, then letting the C compiler to the rest.

Quote:

and in defense of C/C++, most operating system drivers and really preference critical task is written in C/C++.

I'm under the understanding that if you get outside the home computer market and into really mission-critical stuff, such as airplanes and air traffic control, people still use Ada.

I don't deny that C and C++ have their advantages, and C++ has the merit of using the last two decades to turn itself into an ugly version of Ada. C++ added generics via templates and even a multithreading library in 2011. Ada's had both of those as part of the language standard since 1983, back when C and Pascal programmers were claiming Ada was too complex.

My main beef with C++ is that it retains all of C's worst defects. I once had to debug code where the error turned out to be a function that was supposed to return a boolean, but forgot to. Sane language give you a compiler error when that happens. C thinks it's just fine; modern compilers at least let you off with a warning, but you aren't likely to see that warning if slips by while several files compile successfully. C++ retains this idiotic behavior, while at the same time forbidding you from creating a list of references to objects, so that you have to use pointers if you don't want to copy a large data structure. Of course, one of the main and stated goals of C++'s designers is supposedly to minimize the programmer's reliance on pointers.

Quote:

You are right in one thing "Rapid development tools" that helps developers quickly find bug, fix bug and optimize code, has its advantages and this what Microsoft is good at with there Visual Studio. but it not a requirement to write software, there lots good open source software written with just normal text editor like VIM and a compiler, run time engine.

I mainly use a pretty good text editor (jEdit) and good debuggers (gdb, valgrind) unless I'm developing for Android, in which case Android Studio is quite good, though a shameless memory hog and sometimes quite slow. I don't work on Windows so I've never used Visual Studio, but I've seen a student do it.

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@Hypex

Quote:

But Gates didn't invent BASIC. I can't even remember the three names involved that did invent BASIC. I l know they have started passing away.

Kemeny and Kurtz developed BASIC. They were professors at Dartmouth University, so they weren't exactly hard up for cash. They started a company and for a while sold a version called Real BASIC.

I strongly suspect that Python is becoming the new BASIC: interpreted, easy to use, and available pretty much everywhere for free.

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@BigD

Quote:

How old was Gates when he met Allen?

The internet says 12 and 14.