Bill Gates and PC history

With Bill Gates stepping down from his day-to-day role of running Microsoft, he's been receiving a great number of accolades about the role he played in history of the PC. Much of it is deserved. But some of it definitely ignores the reality of how the PC industry evolved and the effect that Bill Gates and Microsoft had, for good and bad, on technology innovation.

At the Microsoft farewell to Gates l

With Bill Gates stepping down from his day-to-day role of running Microsoft, he's been receiving a great number of accolades about the role he played in history of the PC. Much of it is deserved. But some of it definitely ignores the reality of how the PC industry evolved and the effect that Bill Gates and Microsoft had, for good and bad, on technology innovation.

At the Microsoft farewell to Gates last week, successor Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying: "Bill was really there at the birth of the modern personal computer. Bill really designed the IBM PC. That's my non-revisionist history." Ballmer is unquestionably right about Gates being there from the earliest days with his implementation of Basic for the Altair 8800. And that was in and of itself a significant contribution.

Nonetheless, Ballmer is definitely revising history when he says Gates was responsible for the IBM PC revolution. That honor belongs to the late Don Estridge of IBM. If Estridge had not taken the very radical step at that time of going with an open architecture for the IBM PC - with off-the-shelf and non-IBM software - and if he hadn't convinced his superiors at IBM to go along with the idea, computing history would be extremely different. As talented as Gates is, he might very well have played an important role anyway, but without Estridge it's unlikely Microsoft would have even gotten into the OS business.

Once Microsoft got the contract from IBM for DOS (which originally stood for Dirty Operating System, since it was a blatant rip-off of the CP/M operating system), Gates deserves lots of credit for taking the ball and running with it. Dylan Tweney in Wired puts it very well when he says that Microsoft's eventual monopoly was essential to the development in creating "a de facto standard that permitted thousands of software and hardware companies to blossom." And we can all be thankful actually that Gates created that monopoly, because the alternative would have been an IBM monopoly. And as much as geeks loved IBM's OS/2 in comparison to Windows, IBM's proprietary outlook had reasserted itself even before Estridge's death in a plane crash. And with all the baggage IBM brought in terms of how it wanted the client-server world to work, it's a good thing that Gates was able to maneuver so very deftly to beat Big Blue in that fight. One has to wonder if anybody else could have pulled it off.