I’m so old I can remember when Bill Gates was a poor financially insecure college dropout and Windows was a costly piece of **** that never worked as advertised from the get-go.
As a retired self-employed IT Consultant, I (and many others like me with STEM knowledge and hands-on/can-do experience) want to thank Bill Gates (and his so-called operating system) for providing us the career and above average income provided by the IT industry over the previous years.
I say hooray for Windows 10 or whatever version is yet to come, the future looks bright for those that choose to engage in the many opportunities this field will offer.
OTOH, Windows 7 does look like the lesser of two evils at this time.
My tagline on my last job was, “As long as Microsoft continues to make crappy software I’ll continue to keep my crappy job”
re: “I’m so old I can remember when Bill Gates was a poor financially insecure college dropout ...”
You left out a very important part - old Gates was using university hardware to write (basically) emulators for the BASIC he was writing ...
From: https://igotoffer.com/microsoft/altair-basic
Bill Gates and Paul Allen had neither an interpreter nor even an Altair system on which to develop and test one. However, Allen adapted an Intel 8008 emulator he had written on the Altair programmer guide for Traf-O-Data then ran on a PDP-10 time-sharing computer. Allen and Gates developed and tested the interpreter on Harvard’s PDP-10 computer (there was no written policy that covered the use of this computer). The developers even bought computer time from a timesharing service in Boston to complete their BASIC program debugging. They also hired Harvard student Monte Davidoff to write floating-point arithmetic routines for the interpreter, a feature not available in many of its competitors.
The finished interpreter, including its own I/O system and line editor, fit in only four kilobytes of memory. In preparation for the demo, Allen and Gates stored the finished interpreter on a punched tape that the Altair could read, and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque.
He wrote a bootstrap program to read the tape into memory in 8080 machine language during the flight. Only when Allen and Gates loaded the program onto an Altair and saw a prompt asking for the system’s memory size, did they realize that their interpreter worked on the Altair hardware.