- Did Steve Ballmer say Bill Gates created the IBM PC? Is he high?
- Meanwhile the company is battling VM-ware.
- Orbitz to replace Expedia on MSN.
- IPO’s in the doldrums.
- When did the full-frame camera become hot?
- The semantic search is a dead-end, says I.
- Adobe gives Yahoo and Google special flash search code.
- Samsung Instinct handset is hot.
- Smart phones now catching on with new implementations.
- Family Guy creator does deal with Google.
Bill Gates’ successor, Steve Ballmer, was quoted as saying at the Microsoft’s farewell to Gates: “Bill was really there at the birth of the modern personal computer. Bill really designed the IBM PC.”
Gripe Line’s Ed Foster isn’t going to let such PC revisionist history slide, pointing out that honor belongs to the late Don Estridge of IBM. “As talented as Gates is,” Foster writes, “he might very well have played an important role anyway, but without Estridge it’s unlikely Microsoft would have even gotten into the OS business.”
Gates couldn’t resist a little history revision himself in his farewell, saying: “We got it right, betting on graphics interface, even though we told our competitors that they should (do it) and tried to get them to do it, they didn’t.”
“Did Steve Ballmer say Bill Gates created the IBM PC?”.. probably, so. I heard that he also invented the internet, telephone and penicilin. He is rumored to have two hearts, webbed feet and when his belly is rubbed with rosemary oil under a full moon he produces an oily milky substance from glands in his neck which is reputed to cure the shingles.
Why do so many big achievers have to ruin their cred by claiming they did things that people know they didn’t do?
Gore- father of the net
Gates- father of the PC
Clinton- I was under fire
etc.
I think Bobbo invented the PC.
BG and MS for GRAPHICS???
LAUGH MY A’ OFF…
It was more in competition to the AMIGA and a few other computers on the market that were BLOWING 256 colors TO HELL..Blowing MONO AUDIO to HELL..
MS got STUCK in the ideal of BUSINESS computers, and DIDNt want games to be RUN on the system. but couldnt STOP it.
I found an interesting picture of Steve Baldmer.
http://www.imsai.net/
Look closely and you’ll see the home pc I had in my house in 1975, when I began building it, and finished in 1976.
I have some photo’s of my son playing “Star-Wars” on a terminal I interfaced with it.
We wrote programs to interface with the ham radio teletype gear, do CW conversions (Morse Code) to Teletype. (RTTY).
Where was Bill Gates again ?
#5 – Mister Ketchup – picture of Steve Baldmer.
Plastic surgery sure works…
If you listen to the very end:”…but in reality, there is no such thing as a person…” so Bill Gates couldn’t have invented the personal computer!
To #2:
“Why do so many big achievers have to ruin their cred by claiming they did things that people know they didn’t do?
Gore- father of the net
Gates- father of the PC
Clinton- I was under fire”
Clinton was never under fire, his pants were on fire!
John C. Dvorak may not have invented crankiness – but he did perfect it.
Those of us who predate the PC and were early adopters know very well that Don Estridge and co were responsible for the *IBM* PC, that Compaq was responsible for the *IBM compatible* PC and that not all PCs were IBM compatible (Apple and all the CP/M machines… Osborne, Kaypro, Telcon Zorba etc.)
Ballmer’s remarks are not literally true but they are certainly not “lies” like Hilary Clinton’s claim of being under fire. It’s just a little hyperbole, and it’s hardly completely unjustified.
Gate’s comments about the graphical user interface are not false. Quarterdeck, Digital Research and IBM and others had projects that failed. Microsoft succeeded.
Up to a point.
I’m writing this on a PC running Vista. When it recovers from sleep mode it often forgets which of my two monitors is the main one and it cocks up the resolution of the displays and tests my patience. It’s only started doing this recently. I am so sick of Vista (I’ve been using it since day 1) my new year’s resolution was that Microsoft would not get another penny from me. (I’m gradually switching to Ubuntu, which is not frustration free either but it’s getting better like clockwork, unlike Vista).
So what could be the point of the ridiculous revisionist lies about Bill Gates inventing the PC? Could it be an alpha move into the sphere of lying that is called politics? Now would be the time to make that move. He could shove the dotard aside and seize the Republican nomination or do it as an independent — I don’t care which — and buy the upcoming election.
John you talk about Microsoft’s Silverlight being good but will it become popular. I think the fact that Microsoft hater’s which I will never understand how you can hate a software company?? If you don’t like Windows then don’t use it! But no, they have to blog and open up entire web sites just to talk about how much they hate Microsoft. Get a life people. Anyway, Microsoft is hardly a company on the ropes. But Microsoft has some poor marketing people. Does anybody remember those awful Zune ads?
Ralph Brown can take all the credit for the PC. While Gates wanted his own locked down and owned only by him (ala Apple) computer, Ralph Brown published the Interrupt List for the Intel X86 chip set. Coders using Ralph’s list started creating software for the machine. .. Gates basic was primitive compared to a nice stand alone .com or .exe program. Microsoft then released a pretty good assembler and later a C compiler that did wonders for the software creation community. Dos became “the” computer. Later Borland sold a cheap C and Pascal compiler. The rest is history. People could now create their own software, and many folks picked up a few bucks in the small business world doing just that. .. The PC became popular in spite of Gates, not because of him.
>The PC became popular in spite of Gates, not because of him.
Wrong. Get an elementary economics text book and look up “network effects.” I used several different PCs before the IBM PC and no two could run the same software. The cloning of the BIOS and the success of DOS, both of which laid the foundations for an industry, didn’t happen “despite Gates”. You’re letting your partisanship get in the way of common sense.
And by the way I was using Turbo Pascal 1.0 on CP/M well before it was available for the PC.
Why not just say “Bill Gates is the devil?”
The REAL IBM-PC had a MC68000 16/32 bit processor and a contiguous 16MB memory map.
IBM didn’t have an OS for it, and when Bill sold them an intel-based OS, they quickly slapped together the 8088-based IBM-PC from off-the shelf parts so they could sell a complete hardware/software product.
You can thank Bill for a segmented memory map, 640K limitation, and the curse of the intel chip. If IBM had gone ahead with a 68K based system who knows where we would be today.