Comment by santiagobasulto 9 days ago
Microsoft (and maybe even Bill Gates personally) generated a strong "dislike" sentiment to the hacker community. But we can't deny that he and Paul Allen were pure breed hackers and helped a lot the development of technology. Of course, we all prefer OSS and we'd pick Linus (or insert OSS dev name here) 100 times over one of the "evil capitalists"/s, but nevertheless they have to be recognized.
As a fellow 90s kid... I feel the same. I remember when Sony Ericson launched their first camera phone and how we used to go through PC upgrades like crazy. My dad would go to the bookstore to buy magazines with new linux distros included for free. Now I have laptop thats 4 years old and Im not excited to buy my next (heck I dont even need to buy my next... I can run LLama.cpp just fine on my current).
I do think the barrier to entry in tech has significantly increased. There was a wave of internet companies like Uber, (and their global equivalents) that benefited massively from providing local internet services. In the 2000s and 2010s the tech companies benefited massively from global poverty alleviation efforts to get users in remote regions on line. The push to get people online meant that millions of people in poor countries had access to social media and ads but not basic needs like toilets. As the tech companies saturated the emerging markets, covid began to hit. The stark inequalities began to be rubbed in. The big tech companies also dont really have any real material asset to fight over anymore. Their markets have been largely captured. As a big tech firm the game is now to maintain your lead. The industry is now run by MBAs, not hackers anymore.
I think what you are remembering is just nostalgia, people tend to remember the good things and shut out the bad ones.
I still remember how Microsoft, under Gates, acted like a robber baron to the whole tech community. You had a nice product? It was instantly copied by Microsoft, and they pulled the rug under you because they could.
You wanted open standards? It was a war purely because Microsoft wanted it to be. It was either Microsoft's way or the highway.
I consider pre-2008 and pre-iPhone launch to be the peak of the Internet, but it's all downhill from that year onwards.
There's a throwaway quote about the school Gates was attending spending a few thousand dollars a year on a terminal and computer time.
The inflation factor is around 5X, so that's maybe $15k to $20k in modern money.
There were very few schools in the world with a five figure budget for computer experiments for a handful of pupils in the early 1970s.
>It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was.
Three letters: MBA
When the MBA's came into the tech industry everything got stale, 'safe' and unexciting as they want to leech their fucking hands over everything in the name of maximal profit.
Private Equity follows MBAs so you see more PE firms getting into tech during the same period. Same story, fucking leeches leeching makes the leeches happy at the expense of society. In fact, it seems PE firms and MBA grads love making the world an actively terrible place
I hate business bros. They ruin god damn everything.
As if IBM, the big bad monopolist boogeyman of the '60s-'80s, or DEC or HP or Sun or Compaq or any of the other giants of that era were free of MBAs?
While I agree with your sentiment, I think a useful mental model thinks of business bros/MBAs et. al. as natural consequences of growth-at-all-costs capitalism. By our economy’s very nature there’s demand for more every quarter, with substantial money riding on that more occurring on time and as expected. So there’s of course then demand for the services of professionals specialising in more. One can still dislike them of course, as one might the police as an institution, for example, but I don’t find it useful to hate them as people. Ultimately most of us are drawn by incalculable circumstance and survival pressures into happenstance careers, and alienating other humans doesn’t do anything to progress a cause.
Before posting this I feel it’s worth clarifying I didn’t take you to say you do hate them as people, please excuse the ramble.
Allen wrote an 8080 emulator on a time shared PDP-10 in order for Gates to write the assembly code that implemented a BASIC interpreter - complete with I/O and editor - for a sight-unseen system, all in 4 kilobytes. And it worked the first time it was run.
I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays).
Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies them as pure breed hackers to me.
As a kid of the late 90s i feel like it was kinda unfair.
Back in the day (70s(?)80s) computers shipped with the programming language manual. All I got was a CDROM of ENCARTA and a slip to mail in for a restore set of MS DOS / WIN 3.1 diskettes(which was sorely needed I might add).
In the mid 70s you got a badly mimeographed copy of the schematics and a bag of parts.
In the late 70s to early 80s you got a programming manual, but you had to save your programs on cassette tapes.
In the late 80s, you got glossy manuals which showed you how to turn on the computer, hook up a printer and load a program from DOS.
In the early 90s, the manuals were plain paper, smaller, and had instructions on how to use a mouse, and explained what a window is. Plus the mail-ins.
Mid-90s (CD-ROM "multimedia machines") you got a sheet of paper which told you to load the interactive tutorial from the included CD.
Late 90s you got 5000 hours of AOL. Plus another CD filled with co-branded crapware like CorelDraw Lite for Dell.
2000s+ crapware pre-installed, driver CD and a warranty card.
So really, the time period with the included programming manual was just a few years. And mostly all you did is print Hello World over and over again on the screen. So don't be too jealous.
Yeah. At least you got a good MSDN CD in 1999 with tons of example code and all the info you'd want on Windows.
Now we get: {{ Fill in the Description }}
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storageb...
Good programming manuals that were delivered with the computers and with the compilers/interpreters have existed about for the entire time when MS-DOS was dominant, i.e. from the launch of IBM PC in 1981, which always had things like a commented BIOS listing, which was very instructive, and detailed documentation of all its hardware peripherals, until the mid nineties, i.e. until Windows 95.
Until the early nineties, the compilers and interpreters from companies like Borland and Microsoft came with big excellent programming manuals demonstrating how to use them.
Also any complex commercial application for MS-DOS, e.g. AutoCAD, Lotus 1-2-3, the BRIEF editor for programmers etc., would have voluminous manuals, including sections on how to write scripts in whatever embedded scripting language they were using.
Only for the users of pirated copies of MS-DOS, compilers etc., the access to manuals was more difficult and some of them may have even not been aware of what manuals were normally available for the legitimate owners. Most IBM PC clones also did not have much documentation delivered with them. Since they were made to be compatible with IBM, it was supposed that anyone who needs them will buy the original IBM manuals.
Since Windows 95, the vendors of hardware PC peripherals have stopped providing documentation for them, providing closed-source Windows device drivers instead, but before that, whenever I was buying some PC add-on card, it typically came with a manual providing enough information about control registers etc., that I was able to write an MS-DOS device driver myself, if necessary.
Gates showed his true colors right up front with the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", and pursued the rest of his career in like fashion. It's not just about Microsoft versus open source: many of us already resented their strong-arming, dominance-oriented, rent-seeking, ownership-hungry monopolistic approach to computing before the free software movement had really gotten going, or the term "open source" had even been invented.
It is interesting, especially in the context of Gates childhood upbringing and his extremely rare access to computers and computer training.
Something that maybe one or two other dozen children had access to in the entire country during that time (60s/70s).
You have to also remember that computers were also seen as a public good for a large swath of users during this time too.
Makes you wonder how different this industry would be if we replaced Bill Gates singular childhood privilege with that of Bill Joy's (which looks like your typical middle class experience)? Only instead of one child, you could probably help thousands of children.
Berkeley's Willard Jr high school bussed 7th grade student s up to Lawrence hall of science in the fall of 1970. I was the 3rd grade younger brother that started to print all the code, so I could walk through it. There were at least 70 to 80 kids there, and only two years later, they added two more 30 person labs. Dartmouth BASIC and HP basic were at most universities. While punched card FORTRAN was as most engineering schools.
How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read, they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.
My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. They took over the office productivity software market by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly. Their initial and core success - getting DOS on IBM PCs, which led to the Windows monopoly - was simply leaping at a business opportunity, I think even before they began developing the product.
Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? Do you mind that they tried to destroy and monopolize the open web (thank you Mozilla!)?
My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example.
So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening.
But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things.
If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly.
Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way.
Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?
IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows.
That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened.
Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.
Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable.
Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.
Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users.
The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.
For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.
> Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone
At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection -- Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at regular intervals.
IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.
I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.
That's just the way things were.
> Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.
My feeling of IE3 to IE6 (at its release time) is that (anti-competitive strategies aside), many (most?) average consumers would very likely choose IE over Netscape if they gave both a bit of a test drive.
In 1996 (maybe 1997) I was 14/15 at the time and remember coming to the conclusion that IE3 ran much faster on Windows 95 compared to Netscape.
It being (anticompetitively) free helped, but on the 100Mhz Pentiums with 8MB of RAM in our computer lab, you’d be a masochist to choose Netscape over it for random web browsing.
IE4 was quite resource intensive, but because MS anticompetitively pre-loaded it on OS startup, it still started faster than Netscape.
IE6 I found pleasant to use and it wasn’t until Firefox came out with tabs (Opera had them earlier, but you would often encounter websites it wouldn’t render properly, probably due to IE targeted design), that IE lost its sheen for me.
Firefox was popular enough that developers started caring about standards compliant websites at which point IE started entering the “despised” category, but it may not have actually been displaced from its top spot were it not for Chrome.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte.
DR DOS publisher Digital Research released a patch named "business update" in 1992 to bypass the AARD code.> Was Gates especially proficient with code?
Well the article is obviously a biased source, but surely developing a) an ALTAIR emulator for PDP-10s (Allen) and b) a pretty much full-fledged BASIC interpreter that was exclusively tested on top of said emulator (Gates) in two months, in the 70s was not the kind of stuff an average coder would have done.
Gates was obviously a proficient coder. I think you're experiencing a time compression phenomenon here: this was the mid 70s. Microsoft the big bad Microsoft that everyone knows about didn't appear until around the mid 90s. 20 years later, although from the perspective of 2025 those two eras seem pretty much adjacent.
But you stated earlier:
> How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read, they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.
Did you contradict yourself? Also, how do you measure "elite, exceptional, legendary"? Someone not qualifying for that wouldn't be a real coder in your book?
If you win the gotcha game, what do you win? We can attack each other's words or we can try to understand each other. I think my words can be interpreted as I intended:
I think 'pure breed hacker' means much more than 'real coder' or 'can write competent 1980s-level production-quality code'.
BASIC was written as a team in Albuquerque. Altair had good reason to support their efforts. They then purchased DOS from Seattle Computer Products after they made a deal with IBM to sell it. To be fair Xerox gave away the office suite and the hardware to anyone who asked.
BASIC was written as a team in Bellevue. Altair did nothing to support them until they traveled to Albuquerque and proved the code worked.
A pretty limited version of it was written there the only purpose of which was to get the contract. The majority of actual BASIC development happened afterwards. In any case it was commentary on the "pure breed hackers" question so I was trying to highlight the commercial aspect of it. The work in Bellevue was only to achieve this outcome.
> This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.
It works both ways. It's hard to look back at the time while ignoring all the paths the road has taken since then.
Microsoft has always been company that is very good at building software compared their competition at the time. Their office productivity software, for example, is what made Windows popular (Windows is useless without apps). It's easy to give more weight to their flaws because, in many ways, their successes just seem obvious now.
> Microsoft has always been company that is very good at building software compared their competition at the time.
I have never, ever heard that. (Edit: Name such software today.)
> Their office productivity software, for example, is what made Windows popular (Windows is useless without apps).
Completely false. Windows was already a monopoly, and the US government successfully sued Microsoft for using their Windows monopoly to leverage sales for Office. They told manufacturers: If you want Windows (which was essential) for the computer, you must pay for an Office license too.
Where do you get this stuff or why are you posting it?
> Completely false. Windows was already a monopoly, and the US government successfully sued Microsoft for using their Windows monopoly to leverage sales for Office.
The government lawsuit was specifically about Internet Explorer, not Office. At no time were manufacturers forced to pay for Office licenses. Go ahead, look it up, I'll wait.
Where do you get your stuff and why are posting it? You do know that Office applications existed before Windows, right? Excel came out for Mac OS first.
This also how I read the story, they were ‘basically’ salesmen/marketing guys with good investor storytime. The hacking part was hacking together code on the plane before the meeting to rake in the cash?
Yes, it's called pulling the ladder up behind you. I don't think "he was a hacker" mitigates anything whatsoever.
Meh, I don't prefer OSS. I prefer tools that work well, whatever they may be. For a long time, that was Windows. Microsoft went to hell, so now it's Linux. I'll happily use commercial solutions so long as they're good.
In "In the Beginning was the Command Line" Neal Stephenson used a car analogy to describe consumer operating systems, I always thought his analogy was pretty apt:
To paraphrase him a little bit:
Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network of dealerships with mechanics on staff.
Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are expensive.
Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from sophisticated space aged materials.
The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...
Yeah, corporations have the resources to do that kind of investment in Linux which random hobbiests don't.
But why do they do it in the first place, instead of investing in their own obviously supiriour massively invested in OS's? Because Linux IS better, and the whole idea of it is better than some closed source crap. By nature of the GPL license it will snowball and everyone else will be left behind.
This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM.
I'm sure that helped its momentum in the corporate space, where it was already very present, but the whole family of Linux was very well established in servers, firewalls (more BSD than Linux here), mobile devices, embedded hardware, etc
> This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM.
I’m not defending their overall argument, but I don’t think they are talking about the 2018 Red Hat acquisition, rather IBM’s 2000 announcement they were investing a billion dollars in Linux: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-to-spend-1-billi...
IBM has been a big contributor to Linux long before buying Red Hat
It’s also kind of difficult to hate on a guy that devoted his remaining decades to literally saving tens of thousands of lives around the world.
It's very easy to hate on him for that very reason. He's just buying a good reputation for the fraction of his wealth that is completely insignificant.
If I could buy that kind of reputation by tossing a few coins into the void, why not? Especially after I've stolen billions from others.
Its possible. He is following the same tactics as when he was head of MS [1].
1. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
I’m a 90s kid (born in 1989), and I remember the days of the anti-trust lawsuit, “Internet Exploder,” the Slashdot Borg icon, and resentment from Mac users, WordPerfect users, Netscape users, and others who strongly disliked the Microsoft monopoly.
Still, there’s something about Microsoft of that era. Bill Gates was “one of us,” a passionate nerd. This was an era where nerds like Jobs, Woz, and Gates ruled. The 1990s and the 2000s felt exciting, and it felt like technology was making the world a better place.
I must admit, even though I was firmly in the Jobs and Woz camp in the 2000s, I also fondly remember Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, and pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. Contrary to Steve Jobs’ opinion, I believe Microsoft has occasionally exhibited great taste :). For better or for worse, the 1990s was peak Microsoft.
Something happened in the 2010s. It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was.
Then again, I was a mere child in the 1990s, and I became an adult in the 2010s, and so I could be looking at the 1990s through childhood memories.