Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> >   Do you have any hard evidence of this? For example on that BASIC
> > interpreter.
> > 
> Not hard to write one of those really.

  OTOH, it was the 70's. They didn't have fancy multimedia computers,
full-screen text editors with integrated compilers and such back then.

  I'm not saying Gates was a talented programmer. I was just doubting
the claim that he has *never* produced anything original.

> But seriously, we do know, from the history of 
> things, that their first OS was basically gotten from someone else

  DOS 1 may have been based on someone else's code which they bought,
but if I'm not completely mistaken all further improvements to it were
made in house. DOS 7 looks quite a lot different from DOS 1.

  Did MS buy Windows 1-3 from someone else, or did they develop it in
house? If I'm not completely mistaken, at least Win95 was purely MS
developed.
  (WinXP is probably a bit more complicated because the kernel of NT
was not originally developed by MS, and WinXP is at least partially
based on that old kernel, although probably hugely improved.)

>, and 
> while they had to write a "boot loader" for it at the last minute, its 
> kind of unclear if Gate or him partner did that, and again, bootloaders 
> are not that big a deal.

  Again, it's not a question of whether he was competent and talented,
but whether he produced anything original or "stole everything from
others".

> I haven't seen a lot to suggest Gates was extraordinary at all at 
> programming

  There are some accounts about his talents. For example I faintly
remember a story about a library indexing system he helped to develop
or something like that.

  He was definitely a programming nerd back in the 70's. I just am not
sure how competent and talented he really was.

  (Another tidbit says that he once has said that the best way to learn
programming is to take program source code which others have written and
study them. IMO this is approximately the *worst* possible way to learn
programming.)

> But, I am not 
> going to give him credit for being a Linus Trivald

  Torvalds.

> given that Gates 
> didn't even *invent* the first OS he sold to IBM.

  One could argue that Torvalds didn't "invent" linux because he based
its design on an existing OS: Unix. (Torvalds' original motivation was
that basically all usable OSes back then were commercial and he just
wanted to make a free alternative, which was more or less compatible
with Unix operating systems.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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