Angry Bill
A heart warming read
Back in the days when I watched the children's newsreport every day I caught my first glimpse of Bill Gates. I don't remember the details but it showed Bill as something of a renegade, happily steering away from dinosaur IBM's course towards a new horizon.
As you might guess, my view of mr Gates has deteriorated considerably since then. But occasionally there's still these glimpses...
Check out this outtake from a wiki article on Altair Basic, Micro-soft's first product:
Gates and Allen had neither an interpreter nor even an Altair system on which to develop and test one. However, Allen had written an Intel 8008 emulator for their previous venture, Traf-O-Data, that ran on a PDP-10 time-sharing computer. He adapted this emulator based on the Altair programmer guide, and they developed and tested the interpreter on Harvard's PDP-10. Harvard officials were not pleased when they found out, but there was no written policy that covered the use of this computer... ...In preparation for the demo, they stored the finished interpreter on a punched tape that the Altair could read and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque. On final approach, Allen realized that they had forgotten to write a bootstrap program to read the tape into memory. Writing in 8080 machine language, Allen finished the program before the plane landed. Only when they loaded the program onto an Altair and saw a prompt asking for the system's memory size did Gates and Allen know that their interpreter worked on the Altair hardware
What went wrong? What went wrong?
And now there's this email by an angry Bill Gates. Which shows that even the Microsoft co-founder -- who champions the "magic of software" -- isn't immune to the frustrations of everyday computer users.
It starts off beautifully mild with Bill being quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards
but ends up with statements like these:
Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
Brilliant!
Jul 16th, 2008
Comments
Michael wrote:
I suppose I could solve that by letting it search the comments too...
Mar 5th, 2009
Connor wrote:
I can't find the appropriate place to post this, but I have to say, for someone with a webprogramming blog your search engine is obviously lacking. Even when searching for something as elementary and vitally important as 'pirates' the results just weren't up to scratch.
Mar 4th, 2009
If you wish to add code to your comment you can use code tags, like this: <code class="php">yourCodeHere</code>.
Quite a large number of languages are supported, although I can't guarantee it'll be pretty. Inside the code tags you can use any characters except for the string "</code>".