The Myth of Bill Gates

by Liberty and Power

Any historian who studies the development of the computer, especially software, is aware of what might be called the Legend (make that Myth) of Bill Gates, whose ugly, DOS OS, purchased from someone else, but promoted to prominence by then dominant IBM to avoid the antitrust breakup that had then just hit AT&T, came to dominate the market. In Boca Raton, where the IBM PC was developed, some of us used to joke that PC, meant"piece of crap," and that is still true of MicroSoft, especially some of its recent product farces! It is perhaps among the least innovative companies in history. [See the film,"Pirates of Silicon Valley" for a small part of this story.]

Gates and his hirelings, such as Michael Kinsley, continue to promote that Myth, with what has become a fabric of lies, around the supposed genius of Gates' and his newly discovered"Creative Capitalism." When he accepted his honorary degree from Harvard, the drop-out conveniently omitted the role of his dead mother, Mary, in talking IBM's CEO into giving DOS a shot. IBM's management chose DOS over the advice of its own engineers precisely because of its poor quality as they anticipated, incorrectly it turned out, they could take over the OS aspect as well as hardware, after the heat was off with respect to antitrust. Gates' Foundation has also made some incredible boo-boos, documented by The LA Times in a 3-part series last year! For info on Mary Gates extraordinary foundation work, see here.

Why is Gates' promoting himself so, and distorting the past? Ego needs of the world's richest man? My own view is that he is promoting himself for consideration for a Nobel Peace Prize!

Meanwhile, see here to learn about another woman, Mary Lou Jepsen, who was the real force behind the MIT laptop project, which several private companies, mainly Taiwanese, have now made into the incredible netbook, which has started revolutionizing computing (a $200 refurbished Dell netbook, 2.3 lbs, can be converted to Mac OS X for about another hundred $$, making an even better machine than the free, Linux OS which comes with it, and which will make excellent computers possible for virtually every kid in the world, even before India later unveils its supposed $20 version). As you can see in the Wired article, US companies, slow on innovation, have been rather late, Dell & HP, to join in the development.

In 1988, this writer was on a Fulbright grant studying economic development in Asia (Korea, Taiwan & Japan), and, had a chance to meet the young man then starting Acer. I was most impressed with Taiwan, in every way, from food production ideas, which Marina-Huerta Educational Foundation has utilized, to computers, into which we are just now moving. Taiwan has played a major role in China's recent economic development, and, it is a major breakthrough that the two are now negotiating toward an eventual return of all of the great Chinese art stolen by Chiang, and taken to Taiwan when he fled China over half a century ago.

To sum up, what Jepsen gave personal computers was the equivalent of Henry Ford's Model T!

It will be interesting to see, as this writer wrote about a possible"People's Diplomacy," especially in the Caribbean, in the 3rd Ed. of A History of Florida (1999), whether Hillary Clinton's so-called, emerging"Smart Diplomacy," has the wisdom to build upon what these Taiwanese companies have already begun. Now, that would be a real global, educational"Stimulus!"

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Bruce Ramsey - 3/1/2009

You ask, "If, Gates was the visionary you imply, why settle on buying something like DOS rather than develop his own OS?" Gates was in a hurry. He had a deadline to meet. He had promised IBM to supply a product he didn't have, so he went out to find something. That's the story told around Seattle, and I once heard it from the guy who wrote the original rudimentary DOS, Here is the story from Wikipedia, under "Seattle Computer Products":

"Twenty-two year old Tim Paterson was hired in June 1978 by [Seattle Computer Products] owner Rod Brock. In 1980 Paterson wrote the 86-DOS operating system, also known as QDOS, over a four month period. Microsoft, seeking an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, bought the rights to market the system to other manufacturers for $25,000 in December 1980. Prior to the PC launch Microsoft bought the full rights to the system for an additional $50,000."

- 3/1/2009

I think you rather misinterpret IBM's attitude about small computers in attempting to force a market interpretation. There was an open conflict between big machines and little machines, and the two sides tended to fight. Since the big machine people had markets in being, rather than merely potential markets, they tended to win the in-house fighting. Little computer people tended to operate in stealth mode. As an IBM'er told Hedrick Smith, "[If you put mice in the elephant's cage] ...What happens when the elephant finds the mice? He's probably going to step on them. The elephant doesn't want mice in its cage" (Smith, _Rethinking America_, 1995, p. 86). Much the same situation prevailed at Digital Electronic Corporation and at Data General. If anything, what made IBM singular was that of about a dozen companies making mainframes or supermini computers, IBM was the only one to craft a positive response to Apple and Kaypro. And even then, of course, they had to hide it from their own elephants. It was not until the Intel 386 that there was a microprocessor which was even minimally respectable in the terms of reference of an IBM 370 or a VAX, and by that time, the pattern was set, of course.

There was a rather interesting gender aspect to the adoption of small computers, circa 1970-80. Size of computers had a certain aspect of what one might call machismo. Simple little computers tended to get derided as toys. Real men worked on big complex systems which took years to learn. By the standards of the people, such as Frederick Brooks, who created the IBM 360/370, and the various accessories such as PL/I and VSAM, the early versions of MS-DOS, especially version 1, were nothing more than a student project, a reasonable assignment for a reasonably bright undergraduate, or half a dozen of them, learning to work as a team. Their view of Bill Gates was essentially one of an overgrown little kid, selling lemonade from a makeshift stand on the sidewalk. And, yeah, he was using his mom's lemons, which he hadn't paid for, but that was beside the point. In technical terms, what Microsoft was doing was at about the level of what Bernard Galler had been doing twenty years earlier as an academic researcher at Michigan. Here is a link to a paper I did some years ago on a related topic.

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/adtodd1a/free_am.htm
http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/adtodd1a/sm_3_fr.pdf

One of the things I found was that in the 1970's the people promoting small computers in the trade press were apt to be women, for example, Amy Wohl and Portia Issacson in Datamation. They tended to push compact little machines which did the job, eg. freestanding "word processors" which were really personal computers under another name. This distanced people like Wohl and Issacson from men who wanted to build little computers into complex networks.

Andrew D. Todd

William Stepp - 2/28/2009

IBM's antitrust problems began in the 1950s, I think, before the pc era. They no doubt carried over into the pc era. IBM had a lot more competiton in the pc market than the Soft One did in the software market--Compaq, Dell, Gateway, HP, etc., which is why IBM eventually got out of it.
The really big innovation in the computer industry was by Intel teaming up with the Soft One (Wintel). That's what increased computer processing speed and drove down the cost of computing.
IBM didn't innovate much in the chip area. It was just making the boxes, same as Compaq, etc., which was a low margin commodity business.

William Marina - 2/28/2009

Of course, I meant "software" rather than "hardware" as the last word in the first sentence of my reply above.

William Marina - 2/28/2009

It was IBM that set the direction of things, limited only by its fear of antitrust. The original title of my piece, altered by David Beito, dealt with Women and Innovation, not the Myth of Gates, as true as that is, however.
The MIT project, really driven by Mary Lou, the last part of the piece, has done more toward putting a computer in everyone's reach, than anything Gates has ever done!

William Marina - 2/28/2009

What you missed is that IBM made the erroneous decision that hardware was more important to keep control of than hardware. Their engineers, one a neighbor of mine, rejected DOS as not very good, even in comparison with CPM, then used in the KayPro I then had, as did Bob Poole at Reason as I recall. If, Gates was the visionary you imply, why settle on buying something like DOS rather than develop his own OS? "Pirates" is not too far off as far as it goes in the story, not getting into the IBM connection, really. But, the key factor was the Gov'ts antitrust weapon, hanging over everything IBM did, in the light of what had been done to AT&T.

William Stepp - 2/28/2009

Early in his career Gates famously said that he wanted to put a computer on everyone's desk. If that counts as innovation, then he was innovative indeed. To do that Microsoft had to create an industry operating standard, which is what they did.
They also had a lot of help from Apple Computer (as it was known at the time) when their smaller rival decided, over Steve Jobs's objections, not to pursue the burgeoning business software market. Apple became top dog in the small software market catering to graphic designers, but that wasn't going to stop Gates & Co. from growing as large as it did.

Aeon J. Skoble - 2/28/2009

I'm not trying to be querulous, but what part is the myth? I have seen "Pirates of Silicon Valley" a few times, and it's pretty clear in the film that Gates' cleverness wasn't in inventing or coding, but in having a sense of what was important. No one makes a pretense that he invented DOS or personal computers, but he saw the ways in which software was more important than hardware. IBM's self-image as makers of computers was inaccurate, and Gates saw that. As far as I understand it, _that_ was the genius part. Is it your understanding that "Pirates" is essentially accurate? (Not said as a challenge, I'm just asking.)