[Elecraft] Spilling the HF beans .....

[Doug Person]

Bill Gates has written lots of code.  He is (or at least was) a truly 
outstanding programmer.  Years ago he was known to review code, find 
something he didn't like and call up the programmer and give 'em hell.  
MS Programmers have also been known to suddenly receive bonuses as stock 
options because Bill liked their code.  The very highest status a 
programmer could hope to achieve was having been recognized by Bill in 
this way.

Also, PC-DOS has always been on the market. In fact you can still buy a 
copy (version 8.0). It has always been maintained separately from MS-DOS 
since its inception.  A significant portion of PC-DOS was (and still is) 
strictly blue-code.

Bill bought QDOS for $40,000 cash and some vague promises about further 
deals.  Many, many companies have looked back at their dealings with 
Bill and realized they've been had. BigTime.  The dirty dealings with 
IBM are by far the worst thing on Bill's list of dirty tricks and 
double-crosses.

73, Doug -- K0DXV

w6jd at comcast.net wrote:
> That's the story I remember. Gates has been great at acquiring other peoples projects and turning them into gold..I'm not sure he's ever actually written a line of code!
>
> Doug
> W6JD
>
> -------------- Original message -------------- 
> From: Brian Lloyd <brian-wb6rqn at lloyd.com> 
>
>   
>> On Jun 3, 2007, at 4:54 AM, Fred (FL) wrote: 
>>
>>     
>>> And Bill Gates empire was launched, and IBM got 
>>> its first DOS contract from Gates - and IBM's PC was 
>>> launched. 
>>>       
>> The way I remember it, IBM decided they wanted a version of CP/M for 
>> their new Intel 8086-based system and went to Digital Research. 
>> Somehow the folks at DR managed to really annoy the folks from IBM. 
>> (I heard it that Gary Kildall's wife wouldn't deal with them because 
>> Gary was out-of-town.) So IBM turned to the small company that was 
>> supposed to provide the BASIC interpreter for the new "PC": Microsoft. 
>>
>> Bill Gates of Microsoft assured IBM that Microsoft had a replacement 
>> for CP/M-86 even though they really didn't. (Ah, vapor-ware has been 
>> with us for a LONG time.) Microsoft then quickly purchased the rights 
>> to a CP/M lookalike called QDOS. That became IBM's PC-DOS which 
>> Microsoft then renamed MS-DOS. The rest is history. 
>>
>> 73 de Brian, WB6RQN 
>> Brian Lloyd - brian HYPHEN wb6rqn AT lloyd DOT com 
>>
>>
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