 4/10 Good --- hnn.us http://hnn.us/roundup/rss_full/41.xml
| This page features brief excerpts of news stories published by the mainstream media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in each source note. Quotation marks are not used. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS. ... |
Tuesday, July 01, 2008 --- 96 days ago http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/51899.html
| Source: http://weblog.infoworld.com (7-1-08) With Bill Gates stepping down from his day-to-day role of running Microsoft, he's been receiving a great number of accolades about the role he played in history of the PC. Much of it is deserved. But some of it definitely ignores the reality of how the PC industry evolved and the effect that Bill Gates and Microsoft had, for good and bad, on technology innovation. At the Microsoft farewell to Gates last week, successor Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying: "Bill was really there at the birth of the modern personal computer. Bill really designed the IBM PC. That's my non-revisionist history." Ballmer is unquestionably right about Gates being there from the earliest days with his implementation of Basic for the Altair 8800. And that was in and of itself a significant contribution. Nonetheless, Ballmer is definitely revising history when he says Gates was responsible for the IBM PC revolution. That honor belongs to the late Don Estridge of IBM. If Estridge had not taken the very radical step at that time of going with an open architecture for the IBM PC - with off-the-shelf and non-IBM software - and if he hadn't convinced his superiors at IBM to go along with the idea, computing history would be extremely different. As talented as Gates is, he might very well have played an important role anyway, but without Estridge it's unlikely Microsoft would have even gotten into the OS business. Once Micros ... |
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