Gates made his initial inroads to his fortune as a thief and a huckster fraud.
No wonder he is now aligning with the group who are the largest thieves of intellectual property in the world. Must remind him of his early days. Originally Posted by eccielover
I don't think you know a lot about Bill Gates.
His Dad was a rich lawyer. He went to an exclusive private school where he had access to a mainframe computer.
Around the time he was at Harvard, he struck up a friendship with Paul Allen who helped start MSFT.
DOS was software brought by Bill from a widow of a programmer who had killed himself. He made billions off that one deal.
that part is not true. you might be thinking of the guy who founded Digital Research .. author of DR-DOS. he had the inside shot at IBM. accounts vary as to why that fell through. some say he wouldn't sign the NDA IBM wanted him to just to discuss IBM's plans .. not unreasonable. some accounts say he was running late, his wife wouldn't sign it not being business oriented and IBM left before he got there. that guy did later die. in a bar fight of all things.
that gave Billy and Paul Allen a shot to pitch IBM. they had nothing to pitch really but they knew of a software company in Seattle that had a similar DOS system like DR-DOS. So Allen bought it for 50,000 outright. of course not telling them he and Gates had a deal with IBM. interestingly .. Gates did not attend the meeting. only Allen did. Why? because Gates at 27 still looked like he 16. bahaaaa. so Allen and his big bushy man beard when in.
BAHHHAAA remember that Allen was only 3 years older than Gates. Bill looks like his son.
Is Gates a smart guy? Hell yeah. But don't think he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Originally Posted by gnadfly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micros...g_of_Microsoft
Microsoft entered the operating system (OS) business in 1980 with its own version of Unix called Xenix,[23] but it was MS-DOS that solidified the company's dominance. IBM awarded a contract to Microsoft in November 1980 to provide a version of the CP/M OS to be used in the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC).[24] For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products which it branded as MS-DOS, although IBM rebranded it to IBM PC DOS. Microsoft retained ownership of MS-DOS following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981. IBM had copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, so other companies had to reverse engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles, but no such restriction applied to the operating systems. Microsoft eventually became the leading PC operating systems vendor