As Microsoft Turns 50, Four Employees Remember Its Early Days (seattletimes.com) 38
"Microsoft built things. It broke things."
That's how the Seattle Times kicks off a series of articles celebrating Microsoft's 50th anniversary — adding that Microsoft also gave some people "a lucrative retirement early in their lives, and their own stories to tell."
What did they remember from Microsoft's earliest days? Scott Oki joined Microsoft as employee no. 121. The company was small; Gates was hands-on, and hard to please. "One of his favorite phrases was 'that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,'" Oki says. "He didn't use that on me, so I feel pretty good about that."
Another, kinder phrase that pops to Oki's mind when discussing the international division he founded at Microsoft is "bringing home the bacon." An obsession with rapid revenue growth permeated Microsoft in those early days. Oki was about three weeks into the job as marketing manager when he presented a global expansion plan to Gates. "Had I done business internationally before? No," Oki said. "Do I speak a language other than English? No." But Gates gave Oki a $1 million budget to found the international division and sell Microsoft products overseas.
He established subsidiaries in the most important markets at the time: Japan, United Kingdom, Germany and France. And, because he had a few bucks left over, Australia. "Of the initial subsidiaries we started, every single one of them was profitable in its first year," he says...
Oki left Microsoft on March 1, 1992, 10 years to the day after he was hired.
Other memories shared by early Microsoft employees:
That's how the Seattle Times kicks off a series of articles celebrating Microsoft's 50th anniversary — adding that Microsoft also gave some people "a lucrative retirement early in their lives, and their own stories to tell."
What did they remember from Microsoft's earliest days? Scott Oki joined Microsoft as employee no. 121. The company was small; Gates was hands-on, and hard to please. "One of his favorite phrases was 'that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,'" Oki says. "He didn't use that on me, so I feel pretty good about that."
Another, kinder phrase that pops to Oki's mind when discussing the international division he founded at Microsoft is "bringing home the bacon." An obsession with rapid revenue growth permeated Microsoft in those early days. Oki was about three weeks into the job as marketing manager when he presented a global expansion plan to Gates. "Had I done business internationally before? No," Oki said. "Do I speak a language other than English? No." But Gates gave Oki a $1 million budget to found the international division and sell Microsoft products overseas.
He established subsidiaries in the most important markets at the time: Japan, United Kingdom, Germany and France. And, because he had a few bucks left over, Australia. "Of the initial subsidiaries we started, every single one of them was profitable in its first year," he says...
Oki left Microsoft on March 1, 1992, 10 years to the day after he was hired.
Other memories shared by early Microsoft employees:
- One recent graudate remembered her parents in Spokane saying "I think that's Mary and Bill Gates' son's company. If that kid is anything like those two, that is going to be a great company,'" She got her first job at Microsoft in 1992 — and 33 years later, she's a senior director at Microsoft Philanthropies.
- The Times also interviewed one of Microsoft's first lawyers, who remembers that "The day the U.S. government sued Microsoft ... that was a tough day for me. It kind of turned my world upside down for about the next eight years."
- Microsoft senior VP Brad Chase remembers negotiating with the Rolling Stones for the rights to their song "Start Me Up" for the Windows 95 ad campaign. ("Chase is quick to dispel any rumor that Mick Jagger called up Bill Gates and got $12 million. But he won't say how much the company paid.")
But Chase does tell the Times that Bill Gates "used to say all of the time, 'We're going to bet the company on Windows.' That was a huge bet because Windows, frankly, was a lousy product in its early days."
Windows ...was a lousy product in its early days (Score:2, Funny)
And got worse through the years.
Re: (Score:1)
Damn you beat me to it. Came here to say that
Re: (Score:2)
I supposed it depends on your definition of "worse."
Windows 3.0 had terrible performance. I mean, so bad that you couldn't use it at all to do things like delete a bunch of files. It would delete a file, refresh the whole screen, and then delete the next file.
Windows 3.1 still was limited to 8-character file names.
Windows 95 crashed all the time, as in BSODs. I mean, all the time.
Windows 98 was so leaky that you had to reboot it daily or it would run out of memory, even if you didn't do anything.
These days,
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Blue screens in Win95 was normally caused by users not paying attention to the Hardware Compatibility List. Memory management wasn't bad, certainly better than the earlier versions of DOS, and there was a lot less manual hardware configuration necessary.
Running on, but also fighting DOS (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So sounds like you agree that OS wasn't necessarily better than more modern versions of Windows.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, but a BSOD is not a reasonable expectation of consequences when someone "doesn't pay attention to the compatibility list." If you plug something incompatible into the system, it's reasonable that it wouldn't work, but not reasonable that it should take the whole OS down with it.
Re: (Score:3)
There was no active memory management in the PC world at that time, only in midrange or larger systems.
I did phone support for Win95 when it was new, probably 2/3 of our calls were from people with incompatible hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes and you can also run Linux for months without rebooting. In fact, the only time you need to reboot Linux is because it's the only way to make sure that updates and/or upgrades to your software have replaced the older version.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, Linux can do that too. The point the OP made was that Windows keeps getting worse. My point was that it's not necessarily so, and one way it has gotten better, is that it's more stable. I wasn't comparing it to Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Also true. But good luck trying to get random printers or scanners or other devices to work on Linux. If you go off the beaten path, as in, less than popular devices, Linux just can't help you.
So every OS has its strengths and weaknesses.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, the owner refused to verify the backups with an outside agency that actually knew the system ( Why should we? its creat
Re: Windows ...was a lousy product in its early da (Score:1)
There have been excellent version of Windows, but now we've hit a point that hardware is no longer outrunning software and Microsoft can no longer hide their flaws by just throwing new CPU's at them. The bloat is now overtaking X86's ability to mask inefficient programming.
Re: (Score:2)
Was????? Why the past tense?
Re: (Score:2)
Why you're down as "0, Troll", I'm not sure. You state an opinion held by a good number of people.
What I'll add to corroborate your post is the amount of waiting I've done over the years. I'm sure someone can do the maths, but I must have waited for a year of my life just for Windows to reboot (I worked in Tech Support, so you'd end up doing a lot of rebooting, or waiting on the phone while someone did it for you). Even as a user though, I've waited countless hours just for Windows to boot up, because you u
Re: (Score:2)
I'm probably one of the very few who's been in the microcomputer industry since its inception way back in the 1970s.
What a ride it has been!
I recall building my own systems with 8-bit processors and just a few hundred bytes of precious ram. Clock speeds were barely a megahertz at the time but still we managed to overclock these systems and run 110 baud TTY connections at almost 200baud (non-standard of course).
The only language available back then was the native machine code of the processor being used, all
Re: (Score:2)
As someone who was just forced to received a new computer with Windows 11 at my day job, I can wholeheartedly agree. I've already made the decision I won't go through this again. When Windows 12 comes out, I'm going to retire.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you should be more specific about what you mean, because your gist is not clear. In what ways did Microsoft destroy lives?
I'm not arguing that it didn't do so, I just don't know what you're talking about exactly, and I doubt others do either.
Re: (Score:1)
Perhaps not lives directly, but Netscape, Stacker Technologies and BeOS (Be, Inc.) come readily to mind.
Re: Does it talk about the lives (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
So your point is that the demise of Netscape, Stacker, and BeOS, destroyed lives?
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps not lives directly, but Netscape, Stacker Technologies and BeOS (Be, Inc.) come readily to mind.
Let's be fair now, Be, Inc. cheerily helped Microsoft hoist the knife that was shoved in their neck. It was a great OS with a driving force that did nothing to help get it to the usable at scale stage.
50 years of evil (Score:4, Informative)
The only time - briefly - when Microsoft was ever the good guys is when they coded early basics for early machines. Then Bill Gates shat the bed [wikipedia.org] and it's been a terrible company ever since: they've been consistently technically incompetent, incredibly aggressive,hostile, monopolizing and always ready to do whatever it takes to earn money and principles be damned.
People usually get better with age. Not Microsoft. Fuck Microsoft. I hate them every bit as much now that they reinvented themselves as an invasive Big Data company as when they were an aggressive OS and software vendor.
As for Bill Gates, the sonofabitch has been working hard for years since he retired from being an evil CEO to clean up his image. But reality is, his foundation is just a tax avoidance vehicle and he's just as evil as he's ever been, But somehow people think he and Balmer are nice retired billionaires now. No they're not. Fuck Bill Gates too.
Nothing and nobody good ever came out of Microsoft.
I give kudos where due (Score:4, Insightful)
MS made relatively intuitive tools in the 90's. One could learn-via-clicking and rarely had to check the documentation. Something died in the UI department around 2005-ish and their UI's have been crap since. Sharepoint and its evil nickle-and-dime sister Power Tools are a fucking disaster.
Part of it is the "WYSIWYG is dead" fad that came because the fucked up DOM can't do decent WYSIWYG*. It's defending a fucked up standard by claiming the easy way is "obsolete". Balderdash! Using "stretch zones" and similar, WYSIWYG can fit larger screens just fine. People just abandoned it out of industry F.U.D.
The idea-killing fadsters can get the hell of my lawn! Burn DOM! Or at least have a GUI-friendly competitor standard.
(Some say if they open-sourced Silverlight early, it would solve some of the problems. Interesting theory.)
* DOM would have to break backward compatibility to solve its positioning flaws.
Re: (Score:2)
As for Bill Gates, the sonofabitch has been working hard for years since he retired from being an evil CEO to clean up his image. But reality is, his foundation is just a tax avoidance vehicle and he's just as evil as he's ever been
Hey, look at the bright side, at least he's not hanging out with Epstein anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft didnt "code early basics". Gates bought that from another company.
https://www.reddit.com/r/today... [reddit.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Now, now: that's kind of harsh.
I always knew Microsoft was kind of evil, but I still regret not selling everything when I retired from the Army in '84 and moving to Washington, to try for a job in Microsoft. I was a pretty good programmer back then, could've impressed them somehow or another.
I know itâ(TM)s not cool here but⦠(Score:5, Interesting)
The DOS-derived OSes were indeed terrible from the point of view of stability. It was almost impossible to be anything other than flaky and fragile building a multiprocess OS on that foundation.
But, windows 95 was an astounding marketing triumph. If you lived through it as I did, a kid who defined himself by esoteric knowledge of Apple ][ and 6502s and had built a disdain for how Gates & co. threw the established hacker norms aside to monetize their OS, you really wanted to hate MS. But in 1995 things changed dramatically. Normies were now into computers and things had changed forever. Itâ(TM)s probably why so many of us old school people hated in them; they took our thing and made it cool for everyone.
The fact that the underlying OS would leak memory and tie itself if knots wasnt a big deal non-purists, just reboot the thing every night, who cares?
But the thing I feel the /. community always discounts is the elegance of the NT kernel, and the NT OS in the days before win32 got sucked into the kernel. Cutler and team developed a disciplined, adaptable, efficient, and powerful core system that (Iâ(TM)m going to lose some people here) was so much cleaner than any Unix of the day. Because it was obviously not open source, not everyone could appreciate it, but I had the opportunity to develop in the NT kernel after having worked in IRIX and it was night and day; IRIX was one smart guy hacking on top of another smart guy until no one really understood or curated the code and it sprawled tirelessly, and NT was like a small team of smart guys got together and deliberately built something based on their collective experience that was coherent and uniform.
When we developed multi-user NT on the 3.51 kernel and stress tested it endlessly in our labs it was the most stable OS Iâ(TM)ve ever worked with. And it also happened to run all the windows programs people actually wanted to run.
Re: (Score:2)
But the thing I feel the /. community always discounts is the elegance of the NT kernel, and the NT OS in the days before win32 got sucked into the kernel. Cutler and team developed a disciplined, adaptable, efficient, and powerful core system
It's common knowledge that MS has some of the smartest people in the world working on systems and language design tools; I don't think people in general are disscounting that.
It's just that all that is orthogonal to the monopolistic, evil business practices that the company uses to sell those software products and dominate the market. People can equally admire the former and despise the latter.
I've often thought that (Score:5, Interesting)
Without Microsoft, their predatory monopolistic practices, and the general dumbing down of what is now considered reasonable standards of software quality, the whole world would be about 30 years further on in terms of computer tech by now.
I remember this (Score:4, Funny)
Windows was a lousy product in its early days (Score:2)
And now it is not? I would accept if someone says Windows 7 was fine. But everything after was crap again and it doesn't look like this will change any time soon.
Microsoft Philanthropies (Score:2)
All the hallmarks of "NOT A REAL JOB".
Reserved for the corporate fluff that simply can't function in any productive department but would cost a significant sum to dispose of. May as well burn it in empty PR stunts.
I Remember the Dialog BBS (Score:2)
Was? (Score:3)
'We're going to bet the company on Windows.' That was a huge bet because Windows, frankly, was a lousy product in its early days."
Haha. The tradition continues.
Gates had no choice. He got blind-sided by the first Macintosh. Windowing existed before the mac, but not for consumer products.