Having been in and around computers since 1960, I somewhat followed the rise of Bill Gates. It was rather circumstantial and serendipitous that he happened to buy and then sell a crappy, micro operating system (i.e., DOS) to IBM, which gave him a start in mini-computer operating systems and computers. Of late, Gates has ended up in a bit of ignominy with his nasty divorce from Melinda, close associations with Jeffrey Epstein and they way he injected himself and his money into the covid/vaccine scam/scare. All of this came back to mind when I rapidly scanned an article entitled Bill Gates Ex-Wife Anxious To Distance Herself From Jeffrey Epstein. It was what the author wrote as the last paragraph that got my attention. Moreover, since I find Gates a very creepy person who was a brutal businessman, a bad husband, and a bad selector of friends, and who is currently someone who believes that his wealth gives him the right to start controlling people's lives and bodily autonomy, I'm always willing to think the worst of him. Reading the above sent me back to check out basis for the article, which turned out to be some like Does Melinda know something's coming down the road about Bill and Epstein and is she trying to get ahead of it? I normally don't give much thought to the politics of personalities; however, Gates and Epstein are both people who seemed to have a penchant for controlling and hurting others. Thus, I thought this might be something to tuck away in my your/my mental notebook.
Apparently, Bill Gates mother was a Maxwell, and she was related to Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell; so it is not wonder that Gates is connected to Epstein.
It’s hard to know what to believe these days. I read so much of things that smack of conspiracy theory. Then I have to remind myself what I tell my wife all the time, reality is much stranger than fiction.
Well, this IS the conspiracy section of the forum, so that is what you will find when you are reading threads in this section, @Thomas Windom .
I had read that Gates stole the DOS system from an associates garage but with no video back then, could not be proved.
The story I heard was that Gates acquired DOS and wanted to sell it to IBM, who told Gates that they were not in the software business and did not want to take on the role of having to support/fix/upgrade an operating system. So they offered to license it from Gates, meaning Gates had to support it and he also retained title to it. THAT is what built his fortune...licensing DOS to all of those PC manufacturers (IBM, Dell, HP, Sperry, AST, KayPro, Leading Edge, etc etc etc.) If IBM had bought it, who knows what Billy would have ended up doing. Another issue back in the early days is that the applications software many developers were creating (Excel, WordPerfect, DBase, Lotus, Word, PFS Write) did not have many advanced features (especially formatting, printing, fonts, etc.) For example, in order to apply bold, underline and italics to a WordPerfect document when you printed it, you had to learn hexadecimal programming commands. Otherwise all you got was plain text until these add-ons came along. So cottage businesses sprung up creating an selling Add-Ons that greatly enhanced the functionality of the actual application. The original developers then incorporated those features for the next release, and the cottage businesses then had to come out with more enhancements to the applications. Those small businesses eventually went away as their ideas were basically stolen, much in the way the Apple/Mac interface was stolen by Microsoft to create Windows (pre-Windows machines did not have icons/graphics or use mice.) Apple sued Microsoft over the "Look & Feel" theft, and they lost.
I have read similar things, @John Brunner. Much of what made Gates fortune was stolen from Apple, who had already found a small niche for personal computers prior to the founding of Microsoft. I remember a fight I was involved with over getting small computers in a hospital. The administration maintained there was no need for PC terminals in hospitals. Large mainframes were all that was needed.. Large mainframes had no graphic capabilities at all, but the Apple computers even in those days had graphics tablets and displays in color--which the mainframe also didn't have.
When my employer got their first PCs for the finance types (1982), our graphics folks and User Manual folks had already been using Macs. They looked like toys...but you didn't need to learn DOS in order to use them. The PCs had the advantage of price coupled with an open architecture that permitted 3rd party software and hardware. Between 1988 and 1995, I managed purchasing/inventory/vendor contracts for a $500 million GSA reseller of computer hardware & software. We had over 55,000 skus and 600+ vendors. Back then, the industry was the wild west, and price pressures had just barely begun. We had a DEC VAX for the business/ops management software, but as you know there were no analytical tools...just transaction processing. I learned how to data mine and do analyses on the desktop. I did that for the rest of my career for other places that had mainframes. I was the Ops guy who understood the data fields, what they meant and how they interacted, and had taken certification classes in the meantime. I hated to see people like Gates get so rich merely because of right place/right time, but that's what happens when an industry is in its infancy...and cheap computers created a lot of careers. I think they were also part of why we turned our backs on factory jobs and chased them offshore. Sitting in an air conditioned office behind a keyboard beat the heck out of standing on an assembly line all day every day.