computer from scratch, they would buy components off the shelf and assemble them what in IBM speak was called 'open architecture.' IBM never did this. Two weeks later Bill proposed his heresy to the Chairman. - And frankly this is it. - The key decisions were to go with an open architecture, - non IBM technology, non IBM software, non IBM sales and non IBM service. - And we probably spent a full half of the presentation - carrying the corporate management committee into this concept. - Because this was a new concept for IBM at that point. Was it a hard sell? - Mr. Carey bought it. And as result of him buying it, we got through it. With the backing of the chairman, Bill and his team then set out to break all the IBM rules and go for a record. - We'll put it in the IBM section. Once IBM decided to do a personal computer and to do it in a year, they couldn't really design anything, they just had to slap it together, so that's what we'll do. You have a central processing unit and eh... let's see... you need a monitor or display and... a keyboard. OK: a PC, except it's not, there's something missing. Time for the Cringely crash course in elementary computing. A PC is a boxful of electronic switches, a piece of hardware. It's useless until you tell it what to do. It requires a program of instructions... that's software. Every PC requires at least two essential bits of software in order to work at all. First it requires a computer language. That's what you type in to give instructions to the computer. To tell it what to do. Remember it was a computer language called BASIC that Paul Allen and Bill Gates adapted to the Altair...the first PC. The other bit of software that's required is called an operating system and that's the internal traffic cop that tells the computer itself how the keyboard is connected to the screen or how to store files on a floppy disk instead of just losing them when you turn off the PC at the end of the day. Operating systems tend to have boring unfriendly names like UNIX and CPM and MS-DOS but, though they may be boring, it's an operating system that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. And the story of how that came about is, well, pretty interesting. So the contest begins. Who would IBM buy their software from? Let's meet the two contenders: the late Gary Kildall, then aged 39, a computer Ph.D., and a 24 year old Harvard drop-out - Bill Gates. By the time IBM came calling in 1980, Bill Gates and his small company Microsoft was the biggest supplier of computer languages in the fledgling PC industry. (Commercial) - Many different computer manufacturers, - are making the CPM Operating System standard on most models. For their operating system, though, the logical guy for the IBMers to see was Gary Kildall. He ran a company modestly called 'Interglactic Digital Research.' Gary had invented the PC's first operating system called CP/M. He had already sold 600,000 of them, so he was the big cheese of operating systems. - In the early 70s I had a need for an operating system myself - and eh it was a very natural thing to write - and it turns out other people had a need for an operating system like that and so - eh it was a very natural thing I wrote it for my own use and then started selling it. In Gary's mind it was the dominant thing and it would always be the dominant 'cos, you know, Bill did languages and Gary did operating systems and he really honestly believed that would never change. But what would change the balance of power in this young industry was the characters of the two protagonists. - So I knew Gary back when he was an assistant professor - at Monterrey Post Grad School and I was simply a grad student. - And went down, sat in his hot tub, smoked dope with him and thoroughly enjoyed it all, - and commiserated and talked nerd stuff. - He liked playing with gadgets, just like Woz ------------------------------ Читайте также: - текст Пять вечеров на английском - текст Про Федота-стрельца, удалого молодца на английском - текст Светлячок на английском - текст Звёздный путь: Энтерпрайз на английском - текст Стиратель на английском |