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History of Microsoft
Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2013 2:35 pm
by Psychophanta
Re: History of Microsoft
Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 5:34 am
by BorisTheOld
In 1977 a co-worker and I quit our jobs and each started our own business here in Canada. Mine was software (business packages) and my friend's was hardware (desktop systems).
In the beginning my friend purchased software directly from Bill Gates himself. And it was in 1978 that I purchased my first desktop computer from my friend, with MS COBOL-80 installed. Now, 35 years later, Bill Gates is a multi-billionaire, my friend and I make a modest living in our chosen professions, and I still have MS-DOS COBOL running on my systems.
On our systems, the DOS COBOL compiler and application programs run in a DOS box in Windows XP, that runs in a VM on Linux Mint. Our customers that still use the DOS programs usually run them on Windows XP systems.
I'm not a big fan of MS, and its software is big and ugly, but I have to confess that MS COBOL-80 is the most bullet-proof software I've ever used.
There's a moral in this story somewhere.
Re: History of Microsoft
Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 12:18 am
by Zach
Don't quit your job when your company is about to become worth a bajillion dollars?
Re: History of Microsoft
Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2013 6:06 am
by tj1010
One thing you'll never see in any MS based documentary is the role Russia and Germany based firms played in the property of Zerox and MS kernel dev..
It's convenient to make it seem the history of computing is based around America where, like today, everything is really the fruits of foreign labor/talent under contracts...
I have an Estonian engineer friend who was one of the developers at Zerox and worked with MS for integration. He says all the work was from foreigners flown into Canada and California under work visas, mostly from Germany and Russia; it's this way today too. My friend is now a senior engineer for Oracle in Europe...