At 11:26 AM 6/13/96 +0000, Brad Shantz wrote:
Since I live 10 blocks away from the main MS Campus, I hear everything there is to hear about Bill Gates. So, it was really unnecessary for me to watch the hour and a hlaf devoted strictly to who Bill stole what from. **GRIN**
I only watched a few minutes of the show. Did they mention that Microsoft actually bought the MSDOS operating system from Seattle Computer products? Also, in about January of 1976, I attended a meeting at a hotel near Kansas City International airport, run by MITS (makers of Altair) showing off their computer. (They drove a van around the country and demo'd the computer to throngs of...oh...hundreds of people. At the time, I had followed the budding microcomputer hobby only a little. I specifically recall being told at the show of complaints by a company called "Microsoft" that its "4K Basic" was being bootlegged. (Note to the newbies: The term "4K Basic" meant a Basic interpreter that fit in a main memory space of 0.004 megabytes.) I soon learned that they were selling it for about $500, or about 12 cents per executable byte.
Those were exciting times. But, having worked at Intel during those heady days, and being pretty active these days on the Net, I'd have to say the Web, Net, Java, etc. are *just as exciting* (if not more so) than those days. So, the best years are probably yet to come.
Having started my "prefessional" Internet career at SPRY in 1993, I agree that the best of the Internet is yet to come. Bill Gates said in the show last night that it is almost impossible to judge where the market will be in a year because things are changing so fast. Right now everything is a buzzword. JAVA, etc...they are all infant technologies that if marketed correctly could lead to the next revolution.
Literally! Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com