Comments on: Reflections on Bill Gates

By: Darryl Rosin

Darryl Rosin — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:38:41 +0000

“I have an old Scientific American somewhere that names Kay as the man who developed the GUI for Xerox/Apple which included a small device he called a ‘mouse.’”

Alan Kay is a huge figure in CS, and was a key player in the development of PARC’s SmallTalk environment which was what Steve Jobs et al were shown back in 1979. The Mouse, however, predates Kay and PARC by over a decade. It was invented by Douglas Englebart at the Augmentation Research Centre in the mid-sixties and features prominently in his famous demo which can be viewed at http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html (there’s a google video copy as well, but you can’t read the on-screen text)

If you have any interest at all in the the history of computing, or you believe that the last 20 years have seen great leaps forward in computer science and its applications, you really must see this. He makes lists, copies and pastes text, draws graphics, makes hypertext links between parts of the graphics and parts of the lists, videoconferences with a colleague 30 miles away and collaborately edits documents and… oh, just go watch it. Did I mention this was in 1968?

By: Jack Robertson

Jack Robertson — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 13:17:00 +0000

“An interesting thread over at Larvatus Prodeo on Bill Gates’s legacy reminded me of a short story I wrote a few years ago on vaguely relevant themes, with a nod to an earlier Roald Dahl one. I was apparently in a shitty mood with Microsoft as well as the world; was a mite harsh on Gates at least, I s’pose…seemed like a suitably sly moment to slip a bit of blog-whoring in. If you got here via LeProd, which you pretty well must have, welcome. Breathe a sigh of relief, yonder moderators all: no more lengthy shanghai’ing from me over your way. Until I collapse in a disillusioned, sucked-dry cyber-heap, that is. Again.

Thanks very much for your tolerance over the years, Mark & Co, and this (one and only) uninvited ad.”

By: Rex Newsome

Rex Newsome — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 02:05:39 +0000

abbr title=”Rex N”

By: John Greenfield

John Greenfield — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:39:13 +0000

Robert

I also suspect by the time they actually “inherit” Ma and PA would have bought them some fine Chrissy presents!

By: Robert Merkel

Robert Merkel — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:29:23 +0000

It was Gates.

That said, in the real world $10 million is rather a lot of money

By: John Greenfield

John Greenfield — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 22:52:15 +0000

I am not sure if it was Gates or Buffett, but I read one of them intends to leave their kids only $10 million!

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 06:50:33 +0000

Microsoft spend a fortune on R&D all over the CS and Physics sector in the US and around the world – much more than any of their software competitors.

Robert did mention that in passing:

While Microsoft, in the manner of Bell Labs and Xerox before them, have used their monopoly profits to fund enormous amounts of cutting-edge research, they have turned virtually none of it into new, innovative products.

And much like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, Microsoft have struggled to even notice the awesome work done by their research arm.

By: The Feral Abacus

The Feral Abacus — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:47:41 +0000

“Pretty much all physics, CS, or math journals use LaTeX.”

True, Mick, but not the case in the biological sciences. In my field, the majority of journals will not accept anything other than a Word .doc

Blackwell journals have become particularly inflexible in this regard – I offered one journal plain text, rtf, postscript, pdf and html, but they refused to accept any of these.

This is an area where Bill Gates’ products have done a great disservice. The pervasive dumbing down effect of MS Office across many specialist areas has led to the output from a superior technical instrument (LaTeX) no longer being acceptable to technical & scientific publishers.

Robert M – have you tried John Fox’s RCmdr tcl gui for R? It’s handy for those sorts of routine tasks.

By: Rex Newsome

Rex Newsome — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:27:18 +0000

Re QWERTY: Dvorak re-arranged keys in attempt to distribute the work evenly between fingers whereas the original typewriter arrangement was an attempt to keep keys clashing in the gate as typing rate became fast. Human Factor research in the 80s using a variety of layouts (including alphabetized) showed that QWERTY won out every time. While there was a vogue for Dvorak where one installed a conversion program and popped off all the keys and re-arranged, the buggerance is that if you go to use another computer, say at a work site, you stuff-up. Re CPM, does anyone remember ZCPM (Think it as developed by Rodney Zacs who legend has it, was also approached by IBM reps but was fishing at the time) Also, I have an old Scientific American somewhere that names Kay as the man who developed the GUI for Xerox/Apple which included a small device he called a ‘mouse.’

By: Tony D

Tony D — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:44:44 +0000

“I like to think that the ‘Internetworking’ industry to be the ultimate form of successful standardisation”

Yeah the Open System Integration model has wonderful utility.

How does it go again? A.P.S.T.N.D.P = All People Seem To Need Data Processing… sorry, geek joke. You’re lucky it wasn’t written in L337.

But seriously, OSI can probably be credited with the creation of the internetworking and system integration industries. The ability for a Russian hardware vendor to sell a product that fits into a particular layer of the OSI to a South African telco, without either of them ever speaking a human tongue is incredibly powerful.