Saturday, January 24, 2009

This is my last time to diss Bill Gates, and a brief history of small computers



Note to reader: I mention several dates in this post, and they are not exact so don't give me crap about it. It does not really matter, the content is what is important. It's like in History class in school; The test will have a question like "What date was bill #223 brought to the floor in Congress? The answer would be something like "November 23, 1887". Does the exact day really make a difference? What decade should be good enough.

So onward...
I've been dissing Bill Gates since 1983ish when Microsoft started down the road of creating worthless crap. But many years ago Bill and Melinda Gates created a charitable foundation to help folks around the world. Last year they gave out over 2 billion dollars. Now, a big incentive for many people to give money to charity is a tax write off, but I think we are all guilty of that. The whole point is to encourage people to give money to help people, animals, and the earth (what's left of it). I do believe that Gates is sincere in his motives in his foundation, I really do.
So in that light, I want to give my last diss to cleanse my soul of this rant.
And quite sadly, the one very bad decision Gates made when he left to start the foundation was the appointment of Steve Balmer to the top; a fat, bald, retarded moron that has the skills of a cordless drill.

Back in 1981ish, Gates et. al. wrote a simple little OS (operating system) called DOS. There were no PCs out there, so anything would look good. Lore has it that Gates wrote a BASIC compiler in a weekend, propelling him to "Boy King" status. BASIC is a stupid little language that is very limited. In stark contrast, Shawn Fanning wrote the Napster program in a weekend (honest). You didn't see Shawn running around scouring fame whereever he could get it.

While Gates started selling his "crapware", Apple was working on a totally new concept for a computer, the Lisa (and Macintosh). Before I go on, let me inform you that the reason that PCs became dominate and not the Mac is because Apple got greedy and charged a small fortune for their computer. Pcs with DOS on the other hand, were cheap. Also, because the Mac leaned much more toward the right brain creative side, people saw it as being "not business enough".
Before long, Gates was making a fortune, but still churning out shit even though he had enough money to really make a top notch OS. Each new release of DOS was just like the previous except had more crap piled on top, thus making it slower and cumbersome.

During development of the Lisa and Macintosh, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozenak visited Xerox to look at a new concept they developed for a computer interface. The Steves were stunned when they saw it. The computer had this little block with a cord coming out the back that looked like a "mouse". The screen was graphical looking and had buttons and stuff on it, and you moved the mouse and a pointer moved around and you could click on buttons and things. Sound familiar? You bet, Xerox were the ones that developed this interface back in the 60s believe it or not. See pictures below of this amazing computer, developed years and years before the Mac and Windows











Well, Jobs was a real asshole back then and so he went back to apple and had the team replicate exactly what he saw at Xerox. He stole the concept lock stock and barrell from Xerox.
Then of course Gates saw the Mac and immediately stole the idea and created that wonderful piece of filth called "Windows". Apple of course sued Gates but Gates was too wealthy to be taken down at this point, leaving microsoft free to continue polluting the world with bad code.
Gates and Microsoft then started down a road of total domination of the computer market regardless of who they hurt in the process. They were quoted as saying "We will not be happy until Windows is running on every desktop in America". Well, they basically got their wish as corporations had no real choice but to use PCs running Windows, as Unix was not refined enough at this point to be easily deployed, and the Macintosh was focused on creativity, not the misery of business.

Gates had 50 billion dollars in the bank but was unable to write an operating system worth a dollar. Each new release of Windows was worse than the last; slow, bloated, buggy, and so on.
Gates had the entire country held hostage and would not spend the money to make Windows worth using. He didn't have to, there were no real alternatives.

If you are old like me, you might remember in the early days using DOS that there were a couple of files, "config.sys" and "boot.ini" on the hard drive that were used to configure and start it up. Get this; 25 years later, Vista SILL NEEDS THESE FILES. Yes, every release of windows including Vista is built on top of DOS. The programmers at Microsoft could just never figure out how to write something new.

Anything "creative" that Gates every tried to market was a total failure. Take the Zune for example; microsoft thought they could take on the iPod. The zune is a worthless piece of crap and currently has about 1% market share. Many years ago they also tried this new desktop interface that looked like a room in a house where things in the room represented your files and such. It was called "Bob" and was an immediate and total failure on release. I don't think it ever made it out of Beta testing.
Everything they ever made was stolen from somebody elses's idea (Windows, Zune, Bob, etc.)

But look what's happened; Apple totally dominates the news as far as the computing/ music world goes. Microsoft is still making a fortune, but nobody really cares anymore.

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