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
been acquired from a Seattle man, Tim Paterson, for the paltry sum of
$50,000. "Quick" and "Dirty" were truly an accurate description of this
system, because IBM's quality assurance department discovered 300 bugs in
QDOS's 8,000 lines of assember code (that's about 1 bug per 27 lines --
which, at the time, was appalling, but compared with Windows 98 today, it
really wasn't that shabby).
Thanks in part to IBM's new marketing slogan, "Nobody Ever Got Fired For
Choosing IBM(tm)", and the release of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program
that everybody and their brother wanted, IBM PCs running DOS flew off the
shelves and, unfortunately, secured Microsoft's runaway success. Bill
Gates was now on his way to the Billionaire's Club; his days as a mediocre
programmer were long gone: he was now a Suit. The only lines of code he
would ever see would be the passcodes to his Swiss bank accounts.
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
been acquired from a Seattle man, Tim Paterson, for the paltry sum of
$50,000. "Quick" and "Dirty" were truly an accurate description of this
system, because IBM's quality assurance department discovered 300 bugs in
QDOS's 8,000 lines of assember code (that's about 1 bug per 27 lines --
which, at the time, was appalling, but compared with Windows 98 today, it
really wasn't that shabby).
Thanks in part to IBM's new marketing slogan, "Nobody Ever Got Fired For
Choosing IBM(tm)", and the release of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program
that everybody and their brother wanted, IBM PCs running DOS flew off the
shelves and, unfortunately, secured Microsoft's runaway success. Bill
Gates was now on his way to the Billionaire's Club; his days as a mediocre
programmer were long gone: he was now a Suit. The only lines of code he
would ever see would be the passcodes to his Swiss bank accounts.
Related:
- 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... - 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... - MS-DOS:: /M-S-dos/ [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] n.
A {clone} of {{CP/M}} for the 8088 crufted together... - 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... - What If Bill Gates Was a Stand-Up Comedian?
1. None of his jokes would be funny.
2. Subliminal message hyping Microsoft and Windows... - patch
1. n. A temporary addition to a piece of code,
usually as a quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing... - bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
piece of hardware,
esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym... - IBM /I-B-M/
Inferior But Marketable; It's Better
Manually;
Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; ... - 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...
