Bill Gates'
roots in the trashcans of history
By:
Graham Lea
The
Register
Posted: 29/06/2000 at 14:02 GMT
It is interesting to note the high
moral tone being taken by Microsoft in its castigation
of Oracle's legal if somewhat dodgy intelligence
gathering activities.* But surely Microsoft hasn't
forgotten that Bill Gates himself, together with Paul
Allen, has also used trash cans as a primary source of
intelligence?
Gates even admitted this in an
interview recorded in 1993 which was deposited in the
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian
Institution (which coincidentally is a short walk from
Judge Jackson's Court).
The occasion was when Gates picked up
the Price Waterhouse Leadership Award for Lifetime
Achievement. Video History interviewer David Allison
asked Gates about the early days when he was still at
school, but working part-time for the Computer Center
Corporation (C-cubed) in Seattle.
Gates said: "I'd skip out on
athletics and go down to this computer center. We were
moving ahead very rapidly: Basic, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10
machine language, digging out the operating system
listings from the trash and studying those."
The listings evidently included Basic
for the PDP-10, but it was Allen who did the Assembler
programming to simulate the Altair, while Gates, Monte
Davidoff and later Allen worked on a Basic interpreter
for the machine. Of course neither C-cubed nor DEC
received any consideration for the use of the code
filched from the waste bin. Some people might consider
this disregard for the intellectual property rights in a
rather different light from the young pioneers. ®
* In the interest of balance we wish
to point out that Larry Ellison is a crazed
megalomaniac. As well. - Ed
Related stories:
Ellison
offers Gates all his rubbish
Spying
on MS - yes, it's the Man from Oracle
TOP
