Re: How Many Degrees Should a Person Have?

Rumpelstiltskin wrote:
On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:33:12 -0800, Islander <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Rumpelstiltskin wrote:
---[snip]---
Bill Gates is a good businessman, that's the difference with
him. His IQ is just an asset of which he knows how to make good business use. Of course, there's luck too. He originally tried to sell DOS to IBM, but IBM turned him down on the grounds that there was no future in personal computers. Bill was therefore forced to go into business with DOS himself. Getting turned down by IBM was very lucky for Gates, to be
sure, but it still has to be said of Gates what Lincoln observed, "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find that the harder I work the more of it I have."

In the interests of historic correctness:

I find no evidence that IBM turned down Gates before eventually licensing MS-DOS from him in 1980. There were really very few operating systems available at the time that were small enough to run on the microcomputers of the day.

IBM had wanted to purchase Gary Kildall's CP/M which was the only product in the marketplace at the time, being sold via mail-order and grossing $100K/month. But when the IBM representatives came calling, Gary was out flying his plane. His wife and attorney met with IBM and objected to some of the terms of their license agreement. As the story goes, this prompted IBM to look further.

Microsoft's only product at the time was Stand Alone BASIC which they were selling to hobbyists and which ran without benefit of an operating system and this was IBM's initial interest in Microsoft. Gates had no 8086 operating system. When Gates heard of IBM's interest, he purchased Tim Paterson's QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) later renamed 86-DOS system which consisted of only 4,000 lines of code for $50K from Seattle Computer Products and licensed it to IBM. Gates also hired Paterson to make whatever changes were necessary to run on IBM's system.

Turns out that the code was buggy as hell and it was rewritten. But, since the code was then owned by Microsoft, PC-DOS was copyrighted by both IBM and Microsoft.

Gates made money, not by developing anything original, but by knowing how to pick up key technology, improve it and carry it to market.

Whatever happened to Tim Paterson? He seems to be someone who enjoys life, drifting from interest to interest, several times going to work for Microsoft and starting small companies in between that were usually bought out by Microsoft. He is wealthy, but not at the level of Gates. His latest startup is Paterson Technology.

There is a great interview with Paterson on the occasion of Bill Gates retirement at http://www.patersontech.com/Downloads/TimPatersonOnBBC.mp3

Whatever happened to Gary Kildall? His CP/M software was always superior to DOS including the CP/M-86 which IBM offered as an option on their PCs at $240 vs. $60 for DOS. Most IBM customers opted for the lower priced alternative. Later, Kildall developed the first graphical user interface for the PC (GEM), very similar to Apple's, and far superior to Microsoft's initial offering. But, Microsoft aggressively peddled Windows through the OEM suppliers while Kildall never did get his marketing operation working and eventually withdrew GEM from the marketplace. Kildell sold his company to Novell for $120M in 1991.

Gary Kildall died in July 1994 at the age of 52.



OK, that sounds a lot more authoritative than all the rumours, including those I was perpetuating.


It was an amazing time and there were a lot of people who simply enjoyed the technology. Gates had his Paul Allen and Jobs had his Steve Wozniak. These were the guys who were the technical talent mostly behind the scenes. Interestingly, both Allen and Wozniak both enjoyed music and had ambitions of starting their own concerts. Years later, I saw Paul Allen play with a rock group at Stanford. Imagine a pear shaped guy grooving with the band! The Woz blew a great deal of money attempting to produce rock concerts. Neither one would have made any money without Gates and Jobs!

Paul Allen now has a remote retreat up here on an peninsula of Lopez Island. He has invested heavily in real estate development around Lake Union in Seattle and has also funded quite a few start-ups. We see him fly by occasionally in his helicopter. Seems like a guy who is enjoying himself.

There was a guy who worked for me in the early '70s who was seriously into computers as a hobby. He had picked up an IBM memory stack from somewhere and built his own computer around it using ICs that he got by basically writing to the companies and asking for samples. He was quite proud of the front panel which he had built by installing the register lights behind a frosted glass panel. I wonder whatever happened to him.

I recall visiting Fairchild Semiconductor in the '70s and hearing about their new F8 microprocessor which they felt would find a market in the fledgling games market. I suggested that they add a keyboard and market it as a personal computer, not that they would listen to me. They didn't. There was one short-lived attempt to build a personal computer around the F8. VideoBrain was a CA startup that built a rather strange machine and attempted to market it through Macy's.
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