Sidney

It is easy to sum up what I feel about Bill Gates' statement about Microsoft creating the PC industry. The words I would use are "selective memory".

The PC industry, way way back, was already underway when Bill Gates and Paul Allen went to Phoenix, AZ to hock their wares to MITS. That's not even mentioning the development of the processors for microcomputers, the creation of other operating systems and programming languages by the likes of Gary Kildall (of Digital Research Inc), the variations of all the CPM based machines. Let's not even talk about how Microsoft conned the poor Seattle-itte out of his QDOS which was then licensed to IBM.

IBM did not create the PC industry. IBM simply gave it validity. The industry would have gone the way it had no matter what, except maybe we'd all be using Unix or OSX.

Microsoft was nothing but a player in the play that was written years before they'd seen any success.

Once minicomputers were being developed and sold that heralded the coming of the PC because once you made a computer smaller people would try to make it even smaller.

When Bill Gates bought QDOS for appx. $50,000 and licensed it to IBM it simply denied the original author the fame and fortune his product must have deserved. Microsoft withheld the knowledge of what they were going to do with that product from the original author and in a way denied him his right to fame and fortune. Had they told him what they were going to do with the product maybe he'd have made the deal and the world would be a slightly different place.

IBM did drive direction in the market for a while. Microsoft did tend to buy every product they could and then spend millions, if not billions, making them a solid product offerings, and then did use their monopoly power to destroy the competition. Maybe that's what Bill Gates is talking about in how they made the PC industry.

It is easily seen as selective memory on Bill Gates' part when it comes to who created the industry. You can't imagine how many people's hard work he demeaned with that statment, including mine. I hold only the self-appointed role of being a person that saw what computer could do and did my little part in changing the world. Bill Gates' statement tends to deny to me the efforts I put forth for years.

One operating system does not make an industry and one company does not make it either. Millions of people, tens of thousands of companies (failed and successful), along with the persistence and vision of the users made the industry, not Microsoft.

http://theinquirer.net/?article=21344

Glad to hear the truth once more.

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lazyman

Opteron 165 (2) @2.85 1.42 vcore AMD Stock HSF + Chill Vent II