Re.: Does Bill Gates know how to program?

On Sat, 19 Sep 1998 12:56:06 PDT, "Max Eskin" &lt;maxeskin(a)hotmail.com&gt; wrote: Didn't Gates work on the BASIC on the Model 100? At the risk of a flame war...I think that Gates walks a razor-thin line between really aggressive and monopolistic. No question, he and Microsoft are successful, through a combination of luck, brass balls, and the paranoid fear of being technologically overtaken by another technology company. I also think that a portion of Microsoft's problems today can be attributed to sour grapes by some of the competition, fueled by books and articles in recent years which showcase Gates' incredible wealth and Microsoft's amazing success. Now, back to our regularly-scheduled program... The earliest programming example comes from "Gates" by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews. Gates and Allen worked on an 8080 emulator on Aiken Lab's (Harvard) PDP10s during the winter '75 break. The Altair Basic command set was lifted from DEC's RSTS-11 Basic-Plus, which Gates considered elegant. The simulator code was dated 2/9/75. "Programmers at Work" by Susan Lammers quotes Gates as saying that there wasn't a program at Microsoft (at the time; the book is (c) 1986, 1989) in which he was not involved. Microsoft's Basic interpreter products are attributed to Gates, as is the work on the Model 100. At the time, Microsoft had 160 programmers, and Gates was intimately involved in the code review process, noting that there wasn't a piece of code which he didn't read. Rich Cini/WUGNET - ClubWin!/CW7 - MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking - Collector of "classic" computers <========= reply separator ==========>