Hi bdale:
Long time no talk.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bdale Garbee) said:
> other. Gates was the first person I was aware of who brought the first
> world's intellectual property model into the second world, creating yet a
> third. If he had written BASIC for a big IBM mainframe, we wouldn't have
> cared, and he wouldn't have become the richest man on the planet... c'est
> la vie.
You remember Gate's infamous "open letter" that was published in
Byte magazine in 1975? It created quite a stir at the time and
could most properly be labelled as the birthtime of the model you
cite above.
(The letter I am talking about regarded the hobbiests of the time
taking Gates version of "basic" and making copies of it (it was on
paper tape at the time). Gates wrote a open letter to the hobbiests
(in Byte I believe) telling them they were all thiefs.)
> > I feel immensely lucky to have discovered computers and have built one
> from a kit of parts before all this happened. I fired my old 1802 up the
> other night for the first time since about 1982, and then spent an
> interesting half hour or so talking to my 7-year-old daughter about the
> fact that it didn't have 'a screen, or a keyboard, or a mouse, or
> anything!'. The end result is that she thinks hexadecimal is kind of
> neat... I guess there's hope for her. :-)
Oh so cool..... that was my first computer also. The
RCA/newtronics cosmic elf I think it was? I was in 10th grade and
it was the first one I actually could afford. You actually could get
some video out of it of sort.... I remember keying in the hex codes
so it would show a blocky star trek enterprise moving across the
video monitor.
> Absolutely! The capitalist in me admires Gates.
As a sidenote, and I am sorry to digress so far here, I hear a movie
is coming out covering the time period we are discussing.
Apparently it will revolve around the lives of Gates and Steve Jobs
in that early time period. I do hope it is accurate, at least with
regards to Gates as I hear he was quite strange at that time of his
life (no bathes, police chases across New Mexico, etc.). He also
put the shaft to a number of early pioneers, among them Ed
Roberts and others.
Anyone have any more info on this movie?
-Jeff
