Brief History Of Linux (#17)
If only Gary had been sober
When Micro-soft moved to Seattle in 1979, most of its revenue came from
sales of BASIC, a horrible language so dependant on GOTOs that spaghetti
looked more orderly than its code did. (BASIC has ruined more promising
programmers than anything else, prompting its original inventor Dartmouth
University to issue a public apology in 1986.)
However, by 1981 BASIC hit the backburner to what is now considered the
luckiest break in the history of computing: MS-DOS. (We use the term
"break" because MS-DOS was and always will be broken.) IBM was developing
a 16-bit "personal computer" and desperately needed an OS to drive it.
Their first choice was Gary Kildall's CP/M, but IBM never struck a deal
with him. We've discovered the true reason: Kildall was drunk at the time
the IBM representatives went to talk with him. A sober man would not have
insulted the reps, calling their employer an "Incredibly Bad Monopoly" and
referring to their new IBM-PC as an "Idealistically Backwards
Microcomputer for People without Clues". Needless to say, Gary "I Lost The
Deal Of The Century" Kildall was not sober.
If only Gary had been sober
When Micro-soft moved to Seattle in 1979, most of its revenue came from
sales of BASIC, a horrible language so dependant on GOTOs that spaghetti
looked more orderly than its code did. (BASIC has ruined more promising
programmers than anything else, prompting its original inventor Dartmouth
University to issue a public apology in 1986.)
However, by 1981 BASIC hit the backburner to what is now considered the
luckiest break in the history of computing: MS-DOS. (We use the term
"break" because MS-DOS was and always will be broken.) IBM was developing
a 16-bit "personal computer" and desperately needed an OS to drive it.
Their first choice was Gary Kildall's CP/M, but IBM never struck a deal
with him. We've discovered the true reason: Kildall was drunk at the time
the IBM representatives went to talk with him. A sober man would not have
insulted the reps, calling their employer an "Incredibly Bad Monopoly" and
referring to their new IBM-PC as an "Idealistically Backwards
Microcomputer for People without Clues". Needless to say, Gary "I Lost The
Deal Of The Century" Kildall was not sober.
Related:
- CP/M /C-P-M/ n.
[Control Program/Monitor; later
retconned to Control Program for Microcomputers] An early
microcomputer OS written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080-
and Z80-based machines, very popular in the late... - CP/M:: /C-P-M/ n. [Control Program for Microcomputers] An early
microcomputer {OS} written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080-
and Z80-based machines, very popular in the late... - MS-DOS /M-S-dos/ n.
[MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A
clone of CP/M for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by
hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products,
who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating... - MS-DOS:: /M-S-dos/ [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] n.
A {clone} of {{CP/M}} for the 8088 crufted together... - Brief History Of Linux (#17)
Terrible calamity
IBM chose Microsoft's Quick & Dirty Operating System instead of CP/M for
its new line of PCs.
QDOS (along with the abomination known as EDLIN) had... - bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
piece of hardware,
esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym... - COME FROM n.
A semi-mythical language construct dual to the
`go to';
COME FROM <label> would cause the referenced... - Brief History Of Linux (#18)
The rise and rise of the Microsoft Empire
The DOS and Windows releases kept coming,
and much to everyone's surprise, Microsoft became more... - bit-paired keyboard n.,obs.
(alt. `bit-shift
keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have
originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several
years on early computer equipment.
The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so...
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An entymologist in Georgia is threatening to sue Microsoft over false
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