I'm not sure which batch is uglier... or weirder...
Of course, these days, this crew would never be allowed to have a company. They're all white... where's the diversity?!?
Posted on 06/23/2008 9:19:15 PM PDT by dayglored
That photo of 11 weirdos in '70s clothes you may have seen on the Internet really is the original Microsoft team, snapped Dec. 7, 1978, on the eve of the company's move from Albuquerque, N.M., to Seattle. Almost 30 years later, a few weeks before Bill Gates's departure from Microsoft, the group (looking better) reconvened.
Bob Greenberg (center of old photo, in red sweater), then a programmer and now a tech and financial consultant, had won a photo portrait in a contest and used it to commemorate the soon-to-be disrupted group. The picture was shot in a shopping mall.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
I'm not sure which batch is uglier... or weirder...
Of course, these days, this crew would never be allowed to have a company. They're all white... where's the diversity?!?
What a cool picture! More power to those folks!
Yep. Regardless of what one thinks of Microsoft's policies and actions under Ballmer, these folks really did create something big and lasting.
Is this a great country or what ?
Are these the same people? I count two women in the old picture and three in the new one. Did one of the guys get a sex change?
The article pointed out that although some of the folks in the pictures are extremely wealthy, some others are... not.
Nevertheless, they all have something to be proud of.
One of the original guys is dead. The extra woman (in the center of the new photo) wasn't in the original due to missing the photo op.
one multiplied too...lol
For the record, you have to know it doesn't work that way, even now. The arbitrary rules that dictate the fair make-up of a company don't kick in until you have 50 people.
I don’t know why people give Ballmer such a hard time. He’s personally responsible for the single thing that gave them the edge over the competition. They made their development kits affordable—Ballmer even personally handed out Windows Dev kits to programmers in the lean days. They killed OS/2, Dos, and the mac and totally took over due to that extremely forward thinking model.
Nowadays people wouldn’t even think of charging an arm and a leg for a development kit. Hell, you can get them for free in all but the vertical embedded space. And even in embedded there are a lot of free alternatives.
Yes, I know it doesn't work that way. I was being sarcastic and forgot the /sarc tag.
> I don’t know why people give Ballmer such a hard time. He’s personally responsible for the single thing that gave them the edge over the competition. They made their development kits affordable—Ballmer even personally handed out Windows Dev kits to programmers in the lean days.
I have no issue with Ballmer's positive and forward-thinking approaches to certain things. I do have issues -- serious ones -- with how he cheated and stole ideas from other (mostly small, innovative) companies, and crushed them under his thumb, and then claimed the innovation as Microsoft's. That was 20 years of horrific lying crap. It had nothing to do with development kits, which I applaud.
> They killed OS/2, Dos, and the mac and totally took over due to that extremely forward thinking model.
Well, gee... OS/2, DOS, and Mac. Let's see...
1. MS lied to their partner, IBM, to kill OS/2 and run Windows. A good decision, no doubt.
2. MS killed DOS -- their own product -- only after a decade of unsuccessfully trying to do something better (NT), and finally having to instead do something MUCH worse (WinME). The reason for ME was to destroy the DOS-based Windows and make people switch to the NT-based Win2K (and a year later, XP). And it worked -- ME sucked so badly that even Microsoft has no kind words for it.
3. If you seriously think Microsoft "killed the Mac", you need to wake up and take a look at the growth rate figures for Windows vs. OS X for the past two years.
I think you forgot YOUR /sarc tag on that one....
Yeah. Wow. After 20 years the Mac is finally getting some traction. WooHoo!
Speaking of killing of small, undercapitalize companies, MS had the perfect opportunity to kill off Apple just a few short years ago when Uncle Bill opened his wallet. Why didn’t they do it?
These look like good folks, before and after.
That purported investment by MS was actually to settle a lawsuit that Apple had filed, and was in danger of winning.
I no longer recall what it was about, but it had something to do with MS copying Apple too closely somewhere in windows, I think.
Ha! They look exactly like my Deadhead friends I’ve been going to shows with for 30 years - except everybody would be in tie-dyes.
Sorry, but MS didn’t just come out and “lie” therefore killing OS/2. IBM made such horribly bad decisions WRT its design and marketing that they keep the lion’s share of the blame for its failure. (for the record, I am no MS toadie—I was an IBMer and a member of Team OS/2 all throughout this episode). Check out Gordon Letwin’s famous rant about OS/2:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.ms-windows.misc/msg/d710490b745d5e5e?&hl=en
And about the mac, of course they didn’t “kill it” as in dead. But they did cream it for years. The mac’s recent success is a marvelous do-over that Steve Jobs has engineered. But there was absolutely no reason that it had to be that way. The mac could have had more market share all along if Jobs had done things differently. I was merely referring to MS’s (pioneering at the time) decision to make it retardedly easy for developers to write apps for the platform.
I remember when I started writing apps for OS/2 it required about $1000 in software tools—and I worked for IBM! The mac was no less difficult to get started with.
Say what you will but I wish 70s style facial hair was back in vogue. Can’t say I like the threads but I love beards and funny mustaches.
OS/2 was the most stable platform I ever used.
It sure was. Especially if you added “protectonly=TRUE” to your config.sys file.
It’s just too bad that IBM insisted on making the original versions of the OS able to run on a 286 machine. That is just nutty thinking.
Oh well...live and learn.
oops... PROTECTONLY=YES, not true.
Well, it has been many years :-)
It was designed for the 286 originally. I still have an old PC Magazine lying around that mentions it.
The Mac has always been a pain to develop for -- Apple intentionally (and I think, mistakenly) made it difficult. Forcing developers to do it Apple's way or not at all reduced the diffusion that characterized the much more open MS/IBM approach.
But I'd say what came closest to killing Apple was when they threw Jobs out and tried to compete with "white-box" designs that were merely expensive "me-too" machines. Apple has no desire, and less ability, to become the popcorn of personal computers.
Their success in the last decade, and the past few years in particular, are because of three things:
Yeah. The 286 was the first x86 to feature memory protection (i.e. “protected mode”). The problem with the implementation was that you only had one “real mode” space in which you could run DOS stuff, and then the protected mode stuff for OS/2 to run in. And the real mode dos box had destructive access to anything and everything so it was really unstable.
If IBM had even remotely planned well they would have realized that they could skip protected mode altogether and just go with the 386’s “virtual x86 mode” which was an altogether superior way to run multiple DOS apps on the same system.
But no, they thought they would get OS/2 done in a couple of years and they also had some big customers with a lot of PC AT’s laying around, so they had to make it work on those in order not to piss people off.
That's what (I heard) convinced Microsoft to screw OS/2 and go with Windows. Making OS/2 compatible with the 286 drove Gates & Co. up a wall. Or so I've been told.
Yeah, also Letwin talks about that a little in the link I posted above.
IBM had lots of AT’s out there and was just starting to get its market share eaten away by Compaq in the 386 space, so IBM insisted on making it work on the ATs too. This fact, plus the fact that IBM was being petty about which windowing API would be used in the system drove MS batty.
That’s kind of my point. MS was offering the Windows API to be the presentation manager of OS/2, and IBM told them to piss off. It’s extremely over simplistic to just say that MS or Ballmer “lied” and thus abandoned OS/2. It’s WAY more complicated than that.
In regards to the "investment" article below? I don't seem to recall that part of it.
Ah, well, I appreciate the insights, thanks.
Help me understand something, if possible.... the "lie" I heard about had to do with MS leading IBM into thinking they were going to support OS/2 to the hilt, encouraging IBM in that direction, and all the while developing Windows with the intention of cutting IBM loose and going into competition with them, using what they'd learned doing OS/2 to make Windows stronger.
In other words, the "lie" was that MS did not partner in good faith, and betrayed IBM once they didn't need IBM any more.
Any of that true, in your recollection? I'm quite happy to update my own tale, since it's secondhand and yours is apparently firsthand or thereabouts.
Thanks, that was great to read... again. I must have seen that many years ago, or perhaps have read excerpts, because parts of it rang very familiar. But to go through it all again was quite a treat. Thanks.
I agree...my only gripe with Vista is that it breaks too many of my applications. That is a big deal to a lot of people with time and money invested in other programs.
There certainly is some truth to it, but that is still mostly the IBM take on it. The real scoop is that MS did abandon OS/2 after IBM kept insisting on doing stupid thing after stupid thing. I personally think that IBM made it almost impossible to tie one's fortunes to their leadership in desktop OS development.
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