• Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The letter to Hobbiests was valid. An Altair was $2500 in today’s dollars and you still needed to spend a thousand more on i/o. If it was so trivial, they could have written their own Basic. Instead they copied it because they could. I get it. I have copied software utilities/games/etc too without ever caring that a small team spent months writing and debugging. That doesn’t make it right.

    MS in 1976 was not the giant global corporation it is today. It was maybe 10 guys.

    As to MS stealing from Engelbart, this

    https://www.quora.com/Did-Bill-Gates-get-Windows-from-Xerox

    claims MS stole from Apple.

    • thesmokingman
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      4 months ago

      I’m not coming down one way or another on stealing code from Gates. It was a drastic departure from how things worked at the time. I am saying you can’t write a letter like that and then not pay PARC.

      Both Jobs and Gates visited PARC and were aware of what Xerox was doing. Apple lost their suit against Microsoft for this because Xerox got involved. It’s so tenuous to argue it was stolen from Apple and that’s mostly based in Jobs fandom. Jobs was, surprise surprise, also a huge piece of shit and an incredibly, unapologetically deadbeat dad until his death.