Before Microsoft

In the beginning there was Word, and Word was of Microsoft, and Word was Microsoft.

Yes, there was computer existence before Microsoft, complete with books, and pictures... and movies to prove it.

Ah, but the Party always claims it invented aeroplanes.(see NineteenEightyFour)

Baloney. Given that (MS) Time (TM) is a Microsoft innovation, how can there be anything "before" Microsoft? This comes close to heresy.

Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires http://www.pbs.org/nerds/tvdes.html

Some of us do wonder what DataGeneral was all about. It has the air of forgotten Incan cities to me. -- ss

Oh, then you should read TheSoulOfaNewMachine by TracyKidder... -- TimVoght

Me, I was in the PC industry that the IBM-PC (and Microsoft's empire) were built upon. The PC industry not shown at all in the "Nerds" film: 8-bit CP/M. (Called "CP/M-80" after they ported it to the 68000 and 8086 -- CP/M-68K & CP/M-86.)

In the early '80s, I was betting that sensible business people would stick with the industry standard operating system (Digital Research's CP/M) and not switch en-masse to the cheap clone (PC-DOS/MS-DOS) made by the well-known language vendor, MicroSoft.

It's a good thing I didn't put much money on that bet! ;-> -- Jeff Grigg

Hrm... MicroSoft writing a cheap clone of an industry standard and using it to make lots of money and subvert the same standard. The more things change...

Actually, MicroSoft bought a cheap clone for $x0,000 and slapped their name on it.

Don't forget that Bill Gates' mother sat on the national board of the United Way with the president of IBM. For non-US readers: the United Way is a major umbrella organization for charitable fund-raising.

So, you are implying corruption, yes? Some other evidence would be nice.

Maybe above is just meant to say that it might have been possible for Gates' mother to put him in touch with the right people. Also, his grandparents gave him $million of seed money.

Ah! CP/M...I cut my computational teeth on a ResearchMachines 380Z, a Z80 machine in a 19-inch rack-mount case. It booted from a 5.25" floppy and it turned on with a key! All the other kids used the newer machines with all-encompassing BASIC interpreters, but I had a command line with cool tools like pip to play with. Happy days. -- Keith

I used to hack the BIOS of 8" floppy, 8080, S-100 bus, machines with CP-M clones in a subset of C (Cee) that had only integers (no float).

In that machine, we also had BasicLanguage (GwBasic?) and LispLanguage (MuLisp) and WordStar.

No, not GwBasic -- that wasn't available until the 8088/8086 based PCs. Possibly CeeBasic? (by Digital Research, built on the UCSD-P engine) or MsBasic? from the same period. or Palo Alto Tiny Basic

This wouldn't have been something like a Tarbell box, would it?

I remember editing the Applesoft basic source to a typing tutor back on the Apple ][+ to fix a bug. . Long before dos and windows. mwahaha. . . er. . except that it was the "Microsoft Typing Tutor". Microsoft was making crap long before dos and windows.

It bears remembering that while CP/M itself was BeforeMicrosoft (GaryKildall? developed it for IntelCorporation before the 8080 was officially released, IIRC), most of the systems that ran it - as well as competing systems such as the TrashEighty and the AppleTwo - were not. MicroSoft's Altair Basic was very first commercial program for any microprocessor-based hobbyist machines, mainly because they got on the inside track with MITS right at the start - they literally set up shop in MITS' offices, and were given the very first Altair to work with more than the base 256 bytes (yes, that was bytes) of memory to develop on. Furthermore, in a deal that presaged the one they cut with IBM six years later, MicroSoft retained full rights to sell the BASIC interpreter independently from MITS, and to develop it for other systems - which they did, for any machine they could get ahold of.

The entire market for off-the-shelf software was the creation of BillGates and PaulAllen from the outset; it was, and remains, MicroSoft's most important innovation. BeforeMicrosoft, software was seen as something which went along with the computer, or which you wrote yourself, or which was contracted for through consultants (who either wrote it ad hoc or else adapted for you from a general package they produced). At the time, the idea that you could sell software on a cash and carry basis was as revolutionary as the idea of home computers itself. Of course, most revolutions are not entirely for the good, and the negative impacts of this one are still being felt... nonetheless, without this innovation, personal computers probably would never have amounted to anything more than hobbyist toys. -- JayOsako Swag

See also: ComputerProgrammingForEverybody (Lotus macros)

CategoryMicrosoft