Return of the '70s Microsoft Weirdos

theodp writes "On the eve of the company's move from Albuquerque to Seattle in 1978, a famous photo was taken (in a shopping mall no less) of the original Microsoft team, looking mighty sharp in their '70s outfits. Almost 30 years later, as Bill Gates prepares to depart from Microsoft, the group (looking older, but better) reconvened for a retake."

Thank you

For the photo that I need for when time travel is invented, so windows can be prevented from happening.

Re:Thank you

Although your post is obviously a joke, Windows did a fantastic job of getting the PC into the lives of average people. This is something that Linux is only beginning to do, IMO.

Re:Thank you

Can we get rid of that horrific myth once and for all? If there had been no Windows, we would have had something else, and chances are it would have been much better.

Re:Thank you

Like AmigaOS, for instance.

Re:Thank you

Unix, born in the 1960s, had a 20 year head start over Microsoft, but Unix geeks just weren't interested in bringing a desktop to the masses in the same way Microsoft was.

It's certainly true we could have had something better -- Amiga, Commodore, Apple, etc. -- but if any one of those alternatives succeeded like Microsoft, it would have most likely adopted the same evil practices Microsoft used, and we'd probably end up with a similarly crappy system. In the alternate universe, it could very well have been Commodore Doors.

Fortunately, Linux and Mac are both making headway in the current time line.

Re:Thank you

There was something else already, Windows and PC was the clone of it and it wasn't cheaper at all. Compare the original IBM to Apple prices. I think people can't think that the community chose that Text based horrible junk over Apple GUI and they think Apple came later to scene. It is the IBM who missed the personal computing revolution and dealt with MS in panic while MS didn't even have a single line of code in their hands.

IBM didn't heroically open their platform, they were forced to it. There are still some old school small computer shops advertising or requiring 100% IBM compatible. People should look at the reasoning of that percentage number.

Perhaps people shouldn't ignore the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" and watch/read it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_silicon_valley [wikipedia.org]

Re:Thank you

We are 5 or even 10 years behind in computing thanks to MS. Think about it. Who wasn't in 32bit computing except MS customers back in 1995? Did you see the Netscape 4 demos which seriously drove them into panic that time? Now we are beginning to talk about Web services in freaking 2008 and people still suffer when they try it with IE.
You better watch Archive.org "computer chronicles" videos and think what would happen if MS wasn't in scene with their business tactics and backwards products.
http://www.archive.org/details/computerchronicles [archive.org]
People were video editing on their Amigas back in 1991 for instance.

Re:Thank you

I'd say it held it back if anything.

I personally got into 16-bit, GUI computing in 1987 when my parents gave in to ten-year-old me and spent what for them was a load of money on an Atari ST. Over the next couple of years a lot of other kids my age followed suit and bought STs or Amigas. We were introduced to Windows (Version 2, y'know) at school and it just seemed hopelessly antiquated. We couldn't get our heads round why anybody would buy a system running this crap when they could get about five STs for the same price, all of which would run rings round the PC clone.

Of course, time passed and Atari, Commodore et al proved themselves much less proficient at running businesses than they were at designing computers, support waned and we found ourselves with no realistic option other than Windows (95 by this point). It still felt like a backward step and they'd had years to catch up.

So I reckon that if things had worked out a bit differently and, say, Commodore had been as ruthless in business as Microsoft, we'd be far ahead of where we are now. Or at least we'd have got to where we are now years ago. Windows never put a computer into my house, and it did a good job of killing off the better, cheaper alternatives that myself and millions liked me had plumped for.

Re:Thank you

I had 32bit Amiga 1200 back in 1992 or something. I turned it on, said "Wow it is fast", liked new workbench and there is that "32 bit" thing. Basically every program was already in 32bit.

Amiga crashed very bad financially so I moved to x86/PC in Win 3.1/95 Schizophrenia age (my worst mistake, should be Apple).

It was like surreal people were still in 16/32 bit age, being amazed to Windows 95. It is still same way to me, even running OS X Leopard. E.g. I had 64bit command line/linux back in 2003 with my first G5 1600 switched from PC at last, so it was 64bit processor, I could install 8 gig of RAM. Now imagine I switch back to Vista 64 bit and watch people saying how cool 64bit is after 5 years.

We shouldn't have Atari ST or Amiga so we could really get impressed by these things :) It is still effecting, e.g. after the magnificent Word Processing tools in Amiga, I can't get so much excited about the Apple Pages 08. I had much of the functionality back in Amiga 1200.

Re:Thank you

Windows did a fantastic job of getting the PC into the lives of average people.

Windows did a fantastic job of stifling innovation in the PC industry. Imagine how much more reliable and diverse computers would have been if Microsoft had not prevented innovation from occuring? Microsoft was more concerned about monopoly maintenance than innovation.

Re:Thank you

The 8088 processor was chosen by IBM for the IBM PC specifically to hold personal computing back. The processor series was a very poor choice for a desktop machine.

The 6809 was a far superior chip, good enough that a reasonably convincing Unix clone was available in 1980, the year IBM decided to create the "IBM PC". That was bad from their perspectives, because it would strengthen Unix as a competitor in the midrange business. You can still get OS-9 for embedded use or set-top box use. The 6809 shared many architectural features and philosophy with the much more powerful 68000 (which also appeared in an eight bit external bus form in 1982). This would have eased the transition to 32 bit computing, which also would have been a bad thing.

This, of course, is not Microsoft's fault. IBM didn't give a damn that the processor wasn't the best choice of a desktop OS, nor did they very much care about the fact that the "OS" they chose wasn't much more than a set of primitive libraries and provided no real hardware management at all. These were, in fact, desirable from their point of view. They wanted something quick, on which they could slap the IBM nameplate and make a lot of short term bucks selling expensive doorstops, along the way keeping Apple IIs out of businesses. They succeeded on all counts in the short term, which was all the term there was meant to be. The "IBM PC" would have been a technological dead end, it was in fact intended to be so, if it wasn't for the fact somebody ended up creating a killer app for all those doorstops: Lotus 1-2-3.

Windows 3 (ca. 1990) was a tremendous achievement, given what they had to work with. But it was technically far behind what was available at the time. MacOS 6 had been available for a couple of years, and it not only had a superior GUI, it had built in support for sound and networking (which didn't come on most PCs). There was, of course, OS-9. Even Microsoft had a better OS than Windows 3 on top of DOS, namely XENIX.

So it is true that Windows accelerated the usage of MS-DOS by the average user. But DOS itself, which was the underpinnings of Windows, held the user back. How many users had to learn the nuances of TSRs, extended memory vs. expanded memory etc? How many programers had to deal with non-productive technical details like thunks as they struggled to take advantage of 32 bit hardware with a sixteen bit operating system? How long was networking delayed by proprietary protocols shoehorned onto an operating system with no fundamental support for networking, when TCP/IP had already been existence for years?

All in all, its a mixed bag. Windows made a really bad computer with really bad system software a lot more tolerable for users, and Microsoft deserves credit for this. But they don't deserve credit for personal computing. The whole "IBM PC" and "DOS" enterprise set computing back almost a decade.

Re:Thank you

While I'd grant you the fact that Linux is indeed powering many of the systems people interact with, it remains that Linux has failed time and again to fulfill it's Year Of Desktop boasts.

Windows, for all it's warts, allowed almost everyone access to the world of computers.

Re:Thank you

Windows, for all it's warts, allowed almost everyone access to the world of computers.

Well, except those who cannot afford a license.

Re:Thank you

Microsoft does charge less, to OEMs that is.

The license that is sold for $250 in-store, costs $80 (or less) to the OEM - even mom & pop shops. That's one hell of an insult to the loyal customers who actually buy the new OS to update their existing PCs, and to the businesses that buy hundreds or thousands of licenses. They can negotiate a "preferred partner" deal, but it's still nowhere near the OEM pricing.

Re:Thank you

Windows, for all it's warts, allowed almost everyone access to the world of computers.

What you fail to understand is that, without Windows, something else would have filled the void. Progress in personal computers would not have stopped if Windows weren't around. Indeed, Microsoft was so concerned about monopoly maintenance, that innovation in the PC industry suffered. Progress might have been faster without Bill Gates' presence.

Re:Thank you

Valid speculation, but speculation nonetheless. It may well be the case that someone would have filled the void, but I don't think you can consider it a certainty. Consider what else was out there about the time that, say, Windows 3.0 was really taking root as the OS of choice for the masses:

- Apple's MacOS was good, but tied to a hardware platform that was horribly overpriced, which would have been a barrier for a lot of computer purchases by families/individuals
- Unix/Linux flavors. Linux was just starting out and certainly wouldn't have been ready as an OS for a personal computer for most. Unix would have been overkill/pointless in the same role.
- OS/2 would probably have been the defacto choice for most PC's, but would IBM have filled the role of Microsoft to the same level? Remember that in the early 90's IBM was still arguably in their "Computers are for businesses" mode, and like Apple saw the OS as tool for selling hardware; without Microsoft to drag them into/compete with them in the home computer arena, would they have dedicated the kind of resources necessary to improving OS/2 at the same rate that Windows improved?

Microsoft really was in a somewhat unique place to do what they did; they had ties to IBM (and others) that allowed them to get their OS's on a lot of computers, but they were still independent enough to take advantage of the then bold idea that "It's all about the software". I don't think you can say for certain that another company would have just stepped in and filled their shoes, and succeeded in bring computers to the masses as well as they did.

Time travel

Dude, please send the second terminator. I am still typing this on Windows, so apparently, the mission failed.

So...

which guy had a sex change?

Re:So...

I had to take a second look for that. A little reading does the trick:

Present for the reunion was office manager Miriam Lubow (center of new picture), who missed the original sitting due to a snowstorm. (When Lubow, now retired, first met Gates, she couldn't believe that disheveled kid was the president.) Absent for the reshoot was Bob Wallace (top center), who died in 2002; after leaving Microsoft in 1983, he pioneered the idea of shareware.

Should have left it as is

The 70s photo is of of a bright eyed bushy tailed group ready to take on the world. It tells a story, smacks of potential and is a slice of history.

The current photo is a happy snap without a story. It begs the question "Why?" It adds an ending to the 1970s photo that would have best been left unwritten, allowing each viewer of the 1970's photo to make their own judgement of history. The photo is like a cliched ending to a stereotypical Hollywood morality tale.

Re:Should have left it as is

It adds an ending to the 1970s photo that would have best been left unwritten, allowing each viewer of the 1970's photo to make their own judgement of history.

Rubbish. History has been written, photo or no photo. The facts of the past 38 years haven't been altered by taking this photo in any way, nor will this photo change anyone's judgement of history.

You can argue that the photo's pointless, but suggesting that people would be better served by not having this information is ridiculous. This isn't some pretentious open-ended novel we're talking about.

Gates on the desk

They were also gonna go back and recapture that famous 1983 photo of Gates laying across the desk [neowin.net] all sultry-like, but he broke a hip trying to strike his pose...

Re:Microsofts heritage

If Microsoft hadn't been the ones, someone else, or more likely several someone elses, would have. And frankly, chances are good that the state of computing in general would be ahead of where we are without Microsoft, because their monopolistic approach has stifled innovation and competition.

In the early 80s there were plenty of smaller players in the marketplace all with interesting products and different ideas. A more natural outgrowth of that which maintained that balance would have been much healthier. And while that probably would have led to a period of incompatibility and lack of standards, the lack of strong defacto standards may well have created a push for more industry standards earlier. By now many of those things that are still needed (standards for document, and multimedia interchange) would have long been settled.

For all the advantages that computers confer on society, don't forget the huge losses in both time and money that the poor quality of Windows and its apps have caused.

Re:Microsofts heritage

yet had it not been for the visions of Bill Gates I sincerely doubt that computers would have gained the same traction in society as they have today.

Ridiculous. Computers gained the traction they did in society because they greatly increased productivity, and we'd already developed the technology (the silicon chip) to make them cheaply. Bill Gates just was able to capitalize on those two circumstances.

If Gates hadn't have done it, someone else would have. Jobs and Apple? IBM? Hell, maybe even Commodore.

The path taken would have been different for sure, but the entry of computers into society at the level they exist was invevidible. Maybe cross-platform applications would have become far more prevalent than they are now without Gates and Company trying to stifle any such products, and the OS would become largely irrelevant. Really, the OS IS irrelevant to the end-user. The only thing that provides any value are the applications.

Re:Epitome

FTA:

Present for the reunion was office manager Miriam Lubow (center of new picture), who missed the original sitting due to a snowstorm. (When Lubow, now retired, first met Gates, she couldn't believe that disheveled kid was the president.) Absent for the reshoot was Bob Wallace (top center), who died in 2002; after leaving Microsoft in 1983, he pioneered the idea of shareware.