Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of “killing” children with DOGE-led USAID cuts

"The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one."

See full article...

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Hot air as usual from Mr Windows.

I hear he is also going to "give away" most of his stack, these people are so far removed from reality that we cannot take their words at face value.

So far he's done everything he said he would, charity-wise. If you have a concrete counter-example, bring it.

 

[gnasher729]

The post in question didn't criticize Soros. It insinuated without explanation that he had "caused misery". If it had said "Central European University is a training camp for Jewish Nazi Socialist infiltrators", that would be a criticism. A stupid and invalid one, but a criticism, or at least an allegation.

When posters bring up Soros for no apparent reason to deflect criticism of someone else, it's hard to see it as anything but anti-semitic conspiracy mongering.

Seriously, “Jewish Nazi Socialist infiltrator”? What sick mind comes up with this shit?

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Gates could buy a revolution, just like the other billionaires. He could fund his own Federalist Society. He could fund his own Heritage Foundation. He could make a concerted effort over decades to enact his political will.

So I can only assume his truest will is the preservation of Capitalism above all, because Capitalism made him.

That is, by far, the stupidest post I've seen by you on Ars. Your posts are usually far more rational and reasoned.

A complete non-sequitur (capitalism isn't limited to the US, and even if he could turn it into a socialist haven it would change any other country; also it would take much more money than all US billionaires have all together and 300 years, since the definition of the US ethos is to get rich by making others poor).
He's invested more in philanthropy than anyone else globally except one other billionaire, by a wide margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philanthropists#Greatest_philanthropists_by_amount_of_USD

At the time he & his wife announced the foundation in 2000, it had the largest endowment in the US ($22B).
He's focused on health & education in developing countries, because that his view of what's most important.
You may disagree but your "truest will" conclusion is completely unfounded. If what he cared about was robber-baron capitalism, he'd fund The Heritage Foundation and presidents like Trump.

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Arguing for marginally higher taxes is hardly an argument against “the system.”

Gates supports an estate tax of 55%. That's more than "marginally" higher than the present rate (18-40%).
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/18/bill-gates-on-wealth-tax-and-higher-estate-tax.html

 

[Deleted member 28951]

It is quite odd how Soros can outspend most of the world's Reich Wing billionaires to pay protesters against poor little Musk and Felon45, and still have enough left over to remain a billionaire. Soros is the boogeyman for these morons, and his name comes up whenever they want to make excuses for them funding so many extreme Reich organizations. Hence, Soros must be at least the richest man in the entire universe, because no one could legitimately have the slightest complaints against Dur Führers I and II* and their pathetically groveling enablers.

*Which of Musk and Felon45 is number 1 and which is number 2 is an exercise for the reader.

Soros is #4 on the list of global philanthropists (right after Gates & Warren Buffett).

 

[Deleted member 28951]

I really need people to stop reporting every post that mentions Soros. He's another billionaire who's as open to criticism as anyone else, he doesn't get some magic shield because he's Jewish.

It's not automatic anti-semitism to bring his name up, let's calm the reactions pretty please.

Whaddya mean "no magic shield"?? He's the current head of the Elders of the Protocols of Zion. If he doesn't get immunity, who does?
/s

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Both events started when Gates stopped working for Microsoft and suddenly had plenty of time to do something with his life. He decided it would be a good idea to get married, and it would be a good idea to do something significant charity work. Then came a logical idea that it should be a wife who also likes doing charity work so they have something significant in common.

And here we are.

Not quite.
He got married in 1995.
He served as CEO until 2000, and Chairperson of the BoD from 1981 until 2014.
He was Chief SW Architect (a working position) from 2000 until 2008.

 

[Deleted member 28951]

What criticism of Soros is valid and not Heritage Foundation "he's funding and telling all the liberals what to do" tu quoque?

It could be argued that some of his forex transactions (shorting the British Pound & Turkish Lira in 1992)
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/george-soros-bank-of-england.asp
caused quite a bit of suffering in the short term, even if they forced these economies to improve in the long term.

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Yes, nearly a century ago we had a marginal income tax that high. That’s not a wealth tax and it’s not the 50s anymore.

Wealth tax doesn't make a lot of sense; for one, it means double/triple taxation (presumably you're not thinking of canceling income taxes & property taxes?), and it's quite difficult to calculate, since you need to assess the FMV of any property a person has (down to every object they own) every year.
As a result, very few countries still have wealth taxes (5 in the OECD).

An estate tax makes much more sense -- you only need to calculate it once, when a person dies, and it's when you need to assess the estate value's anyway in order to determine how to divvy up the estate among the heirs.
Of course, that needs to be combined with closing various loopholes and tightening exemptions, but is doable; the max US Federal estate tax used to be 70% as late as 1981 (40% today).

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Thanks for mentioning him, it now fits a few more pieces into place. I always understood Musk's greed, but I couldn't quite understand his glee in tearing apart US democracy and it's institutions. Now it makes sense, he's killing democracy to make way for the literal TechnoKings. Autocratic Rule by his billionaire class of Tech Bros.

The utter absurdity of Religious MAGA cheering on atheist Musk tearing down democracy and freedom, so they can be his serfs.

More than anything else, I think that Musk, now that he's the world's richest person, is driven by 2 things:
1) Gaining as much power as possible (political, not directly financial); trying to found a dynasty & tribe is part of this.
2) Being a contrarian & pissing as many people off as he can.

I think he always had a lot of the childish #2 in him, but once he got rich enough, he stopped needing to care what anyone thought, and simply enjoys being outrageous. Recall officially notifying the SEC his title at Tesla would be "TechnoKing" in 2021:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459021012981/tsla-8k_20210315.htm

 

[Deleted member 28951]

The same little Bill who screwed his boyhood bud, Paul Allen, who came up with the ideas that eventually became microsoft?

The guy who bought or stole other people's ideas and then hired a bunch of real programmers to make them run, because he could not?

Bill Gates = Scamming and screwing people for 50 years.

Where I you getting this from?
I corresponded with Gates in the late 1970s, after having reverse-engineered Micro-Soft's (IIRC that's how it was still known) BASIC interpreter for the Commodore PET, one version of their 6502 CPU BASIC interpreter family.
I did it both out of curiosity, and since I was writing lots of commercial Assembly SW for Commodore machines that was used in combination with BASIC, and some aspects of the BASIC design affected performance (e.g., string garbage collection in particular caused random delays).
Gates gave me relevant technical answers, and clearly was very much familiar with the detailed Assembly code
(Microsoft had ~20-25 employees at the time, IIRC). He also participated in writing articles for various microcomputer
publications during this period, such as Kilobaud.

Sure, Paul Allen helped solve some specific issues, and I believe he came up with the scheme of using the DEC PDP Macro-10 Assembler as a cross-assembler, to generate code for all 6502 variants from a single source file
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774
But both co-founded the company, and both had good pre-college programming skills.

 

[SixDegrees]

Wealth tax doesn't make a lot of sense; for one, it means double/triple taxation (presumably you're not thinking of canceling income taxes & property taxes?), and it's quite difficult to calculate, since you need to assess the FMV of any property a person has (down to every object they own) every year.
As a result, very few countries still have wealth taxes (5 in the OECD).

An estate tax makes much more sense -- you only need to calculate it once, when a person dies, and it's when you need to assess the estate value's anyway in order to determine how to divvy up the estate among the heirs.
Of course, that needs to be combined with closing various loopholes and tightening exemptions, but is doable; the max US Federal estate tax used to be 70% as late as 1981 (40% today).

Meh. It's not hard to come up with a simple formula. We already do this for property taxes, which are wealth taxes. The formula usually doesn't reflect true market value, but it's simple and consistent, and property taxes are common. Deciding what to count as wealth might be a bit trickier, but also not that hard.

Estate taxes are OK but do need some fairly low level for exemptions so small family businesses don't get wipe out - say maybe $5 million before the tax kicks in or so.

 

[internetomancer]

Wealth tax doesn't make a lot of sense; for one, it means double/triple taxation (presumably you're not thinking of canceling income taxes & property taxes?), and it's quite difficult to calculate, since you need to assess the FMV of any property a person has (down to every object they own) every year.
As a result, very few countries still have wealth taxes (5 in the OECD).

An estate tax makes much more sense -- you only need to calculate it once, when a person dies, and it's when you need to assess the estate value's anyway in order to determine how to divvy up the estate among the heirs.
Of course, that needs to be combined with closing various loopholes and tightening exemptions, but is doable; the max US Federal estate tax used to be 70% as late as 1981 (40% today).

Double/triple/etc. taxation is already pretty normal. Property + Sales + Corporate + Income + etc. might be complicated, but it doesn't really matter, so long as the sum of taxes is the same.

It would be difficult if the wealth tax applied to everyone. But the proposals in the US are only for >$30M or >$50M in net-worth. So pretty limited.

Agree that an estate tax that can't in some way be evaded would be great.

 

[Sehven]

It seriously blows my mind that the arch-villain of the 90s turned out to be a good dude.

You either die a villain or you live long enough to... wait.

 

[CrystalCowboy]

Melinda French Gates says Elon Musk should 'actually see what's going on in the world' before making decisions on US foreign aid

 

[Zarsus]

Every tagline and caption mentioning Musk can now standardize their text as "Elon Musk, Baby Killer".

We should all do our parts by incorporating this tagline, until Grok regurgitate it as the fact it is.

 

[ScifiGeek]

Melinda French Gates says Elon Musk should 'actually see what's going on in the world' before making decisions on US foreign aid

I think she's assuming Elon Musk has functional empathy, and is just ignorant of the suffering.

IMO, the real problem is Musk's lack of actual empathy. He has to at least be semi aware, that he is going to increase suffering (and deaths) of those in precarious situations.

He just doesn't care. At all. Travelling would not change that.

 

[SixDegrees]

I think she's assuming Elon Musk has functional empathy, and is just ignorant of the suffering.

IMO, the real problem is Musk's lack of actual empathy. He has to at least be semi aware, that he is going to increase suffering (and deaths) of those in precarious situations.

He just doesn't care. At all. Travelling would not change that.

Worse, I think he actually enjoys inflicting it.

 

[real mikeb_60]

Trump gave him carte blanche and his advice was acted upon without needing to double check with Trump himself. Subject matter experts in the government were ignored and often times fired because they mattered less than a druggie who thinks fighting the 'Woke mind virus" is an existential fight for humanity.

Musk was determined to gut USAID, gutting USAID has killed people in the short time since he did it and will continue to kill people. Elon Musk and the kids he hired for DOGE think this is good times. Know why no President in 60 years got rid of it? Because it was both a force for good and projected American soft power in one go. But Donald Trump is too stupid to understand soft power and Elon Musk thinks keeping poor people from dying of disease is not a good thing. In fact Elon Musk actually joyfully posted about how he worked overtime instead of going to parties to kill an agency that distributes to people dying slowly and painfully of disease.

Elon Musk paid Trump a lot of money to get this power.

Putin & Xi got their wedding present: Trump. The US is now irrelevant as a worldwide force.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

What do you expect from ketamine brain damage?

 

[Chuckstar]

Andrew Carnegie enters the chat…

You don’t get a pass for beating up striking workers, as long as you open some public libraries for poor people, afterwards? Huh… who knew…

 

[alisonken1]

Melinda's charity work wouldn't have gone very far if she hadn't married Bill Gates and got her mittens on his money to spend it.

Strawman. The argument is about Bill and philantrhopy.

As far as "real programmers" are concerned: Gates and Allen created Microsoft BASIC so if you claim he wasn't a real programmer, that is ridiculous. He then decided to turn Microsoft into a real company, which I, as a "real programmer", would never have managed. It's a basic example of time management: If you can hire 100 top programmers but no top company leader then you work as the company leader and not as a programmer. Everything else is stupid.

Not the argument either.

Microsoft (under Bill) destroyed companies and broke the law in building the MS empire.
The argument about Bill being "one of the good guys" depends on whether you take into account his past in building his fortune.

Based on how everyone is backfilling on Musk, Bill should not be getting a pass because of his wife's influence. For some unknown reason, Bill gets a pass on how he made his billions because of how he's spending his billions now.

 

[Ryzzen]

...says man responsible for making Covid vaccines cost money.

 

[petersphilo]

It's so crazy that we now live in a world where Bill Gates -- the man who made his massive fortune forcing people to use crappy overpriced knock-off software, holding innovation at bay by using monopoly power -- is now the good guy!
How far we've fallen..
We're now so used to being ruled and kept down by these internet-age robber barons that we never stop to think 'why is this thus?'!!!

 

[ScifiGeek]

It's so crazy that we now live in a world where Bill Gates -- the man who made his massive fortune forcing people to use crappy overpriced knock-off software, holding innovation at bay by using monopoly power -- is now the good guy!
How far we've fallen..
We're now so used to being ruled and kept down by these internet-age robber barons that we never stop to think 'why is this thus?'!!!

Bill Gates crime of forcing a crappy OS on us, pales into insignificance when compared to Musk, a literal baby killing Nazi.

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Bill Gates crime of forcing a crappy OS on us, pales into insignificance when compared to Musk, a literal baby killing Nazi.

He didn't force it. People preferred backward compatibility to decent OSes. There were personal computer OSes with preemptive multitasking years 15 years before Windows (e.g., MP/M-80, the multiuser version of CP/M, dates from 1979).

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

He didn't force it. People preferred backward compatibility to decent OSes. There were personal computer OSes with preemptive multitasking years 15 years before Windows (e.g., MP/M-80, the multiuser version of CP/M, dates from 1979).

There's a reason Microsoft spent as much time as it did in court and got hit with as many antitrust sentences that it did.

If backward compatibility had been the clincher, *nix already provided, as did MacOS. Arguably a LOT better than windows, as anyone who's tried getting a program written for 3.11, 95, 98, xp, 2000, nt, vista and windows 7 work in other versions can readily attest.

There were reasons Windows ate the consumer market, but backwards compatibility was very much not it.

 

[real mikeb_60]

There's a reason Microsoft spent as much time as it did in court and got hit with as many antitrust sentences that it did.

If backward compatibility had been the clincher, *nix already provided, as did MacOS. Arguably a LOT better than windows, as anyone who's tried getting a program written for 3.11, 95, 98, xp, 2000, nt, vista and windows 7 work in other versions can readily attest.

There were reasons Windows ate the consumer market, but backwards compatibility was very much not it.

Disagree. Backward compatibility is still there. Mostly. Depends on how far back you want to push "compatible" and how much work you're willing to do if issues arise in specific cases.

Nearly everything written for XP and later Windows (32-bit binaries) still works fine (there are exceptions and fiddles needed in some cases, and there are usually more modern alternatives available for consumer and much business software) in Windows 10 and 11. Even stuff written for Windows 95 and later usually works as long as its fully 32-bit (including the installer).

For full backward compatibility, to Win 3.1 and DOS, yes, other tools are required, because 64-bit Windows cannot run 16-bit software natively (an Intel CPU limitation iirc). FWIW, 64-bit Linux on an Intel CPU can't natively run 16-bit binaries either. For both Windows and Linux, there are VM-like emulators (DOSBox and kin) that can do that, or you can run DOS and Win3.1 in a real VM like VirtualBox, though the latter sometimes breaks when the software can't handle modern processor speeds or loss of some CPU instructions over the years.

Where you run into real problems is with custom software. If the hardware support for something isn't there any more (have you see a new PC with a parallel printer port or a DB25 serial port recently?), the software may be broken. Industrial software might be broken, for instance, if ports needed to talk to older machines aren't there any more or don't work as they used to. If you have the source code, you might be able to update and recompile it, but Windows doesn't come packaged with the compilers and utilities you might need to work with the source; Linux comes with those. It's not unavailable, though, even for free, if you look around: the gcc line of compilers and tools exists (free) for Windows; many other *nix tools are around for Windows too (usually free); and there's a surprisingly complete, free "Community" version of Visual Studio and related languages. So even with very old specialized software, it may be possible to fix it if the old binaries no longer work, as long as hardware support is still there. Yes, recompiling the source to 32- or 64-bit binaries isn't really "backward compatible" as usually defined, but works in a pinch; I had to do that to keep an old air quality model going for a few more years (until EPA changed the modeling rules) around Y2K (most of the source originally written for IBM mainframe then ported to DOS; needed to make it work reliably in Win98 and XP).

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Disagree. Backward compatibility is still there. Mostly. Depends on how far back you want to push "compatible" and how much work you're willing to do if issues arise in specific cases.

Nearly everything written for XP and later Windows (32-bit binaries) still works fine (there are exceptions and fiddles needed in some cases, and there are usually more modern alternatives available for consumer and much business software) in Windows 10 and 11. Even stuff written for Windows 95 and later usually works as long as its fully 32-bit (including the installer).

For full backward compatibility, to Win 3.1 and DOS, yes, other tools are required, because 64-bit Windows cannot run 16-bit software natively (an Intel CPU limitation iirc). FWIW, 64-bit Linux on an Intel CPU can't natively run 16-bit binaries either. For both Windows and Linux, there are VM-like emulators (DOSBox and kin) that can do that, or you can run DOS and Win3.1 in a real VM like VirtualBox, though the latter sometimes breaks when the software can't handle modern processor speeds or loss of some CPU instructions over the years.

Where you run into real problems is with custom software. If the hardware support for something isn't there any more (have you see a new PC with a parallel printer port or a DB25 serial port recently?), the software may be broken. Industrial software might be broken, for instance, if ports needed to talk to older machines aren't there any more or don't work as they used to. If you have the source code, you might be able to update and recompile it, but Windows doesn't come packaged with the compilers and utilities you might need to work with the source; Linux comes with those. It's not unavailable, though, even for free, if you look around: the gcc line of compilers and tools exists (free) for Windows; many other *nix tools are around for Windows too (usually free); and there's a surprisingly complete, free "Community" version of Visual Studio and related languages. So even with very old specialized software, it may be possible to fix it if the old binaries no longer work, as long as hardware support is still there. Yes, recompiling the source to 32- or 64-bit binaries isn't really "backward compatible" as usually defined, but works in a pinch; I had to do that to keep an old air quality model going for a few more years (until EPA changed the modeling rules) at one point (most of the source originally written for IBM mainframe then ported to DOS; needed to make it work reliably in Win98 and XP).

Oh, I know all of that. More than some fiddling required, I should say, and not just in the switch between 16, 32, and 64 bit architecture either.

I should disclose that during the time I used 95, 98, xp and vista I also used various flavors of *nix. My experience was always that what you got to work on one linux distro you could get to work on another a lot more easily than you could run windows apps on later versions than they'd been weitten for. Never fucking just ticking the 'compatibility mode' box and be done...

The point, though, is that Gates very much did not depend on backwards compatibility to eat the consumer market any more than a shark relies on it's accounting skills to make a living.

 

[Tofystedeth]

Oh, I know all of that. More than some fiddling required, I should say, and not just in the switch between 16, 32, and 64 bit architecture either.

I should disclose that during the time I used 95, 98, xp and vista I also used various flavors of *nix. My experience was always that what you got to work on one linux distro you could get to work on another a lot more easily than you could run windows apps on later versions than they'd been weitten for. Never fucking just ticking the 'compatibility mode' box and be done...

The point, though, is that Gates very much did not depend on backwards compatibility to eat the consumer market any more than a shark relies on it's accounting skills to make a living.

Back compat was huge for businesses. Consumers didn't care nearly as much. Especially when consumer PCs were only just barely a thing.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Back compat was huge for businesses. Consumers didn't care nearly as much. Especially when consumer PCs were only just barely a thing.

Linux was late in the game, sure, and I'm sure I'll come off as real oldstyle nerd when I complain that technically Linux was already by 98 the superior solution. Especially after MS shot itself in both feet with NT.

Of course, FOSS did not have a marketing department. MS did. That's how Gates chose to vote with our wallets.

 

[real mikeb_60]

Linux was late in the game, sure, and I'm sure I'll come off as real oldstyle nerd when I complain that technically Linux was already by 98 the superior solution. Especially after MS shot itself in both feet with NT.

Of course, FOSS did not have a marketing department. MS did. That's how Gates chose to vote with our wallets.

I'm probably nearly as old-style as you, having started with punch cards and a IBM 360/40 using Assembler and FORTRAN IV. IBM is an interesting case of backward compatibility too, outside of the MS universe, where software written for most 360-series mainframes can still be made to work on the latest z series. There's a FOSS IBM mainframe emulator (Hercules) available for Windows that you can play with, though unless you want to also run a very old freeware version of VM/CMS you might need to spend thousand$ to lease the OS for it. (If you don't mind building from source (except in Windows), a newer version appears to exist at Github.) I've played with that in the past; a couple of my old EXECs still work!

I also tried Linux several times over the years. Frankly, for my purposes, it wasn't useful until recently (last couple of main versions of Mint). Even now, I use several pieces (not an exhaustive list) of Windows software (many but not all of which are old versions designed for Windows 7 or earlier) that simply don't have a useful equivalent in Linux but so far resist use in WINE, including:

• ACD (now CanvasX) Canvas 17 GIS (more recent versions are subscription-only)
• Diamond Cut Audio Restoration Tools ^{* #}
• Open Rails & Train Simulator Route Editor ^*
• Links 2003 & Arnold Palmer Course Designer ^**
• Irfanview ^#
• Windows Character Map ^@
• Cloudflare Warp ^*

Notes:
* Currently supported, but have not been able to port using Wine or otherwise.
** Long out of support, but still works fine in Windows 11. No equivalent in Linux.
# Similar products in Linux are not a direct replacement and are harder to use.
@ Yes, there's a Character Map in Mint (Ubuntu). It's not a replacement, much harder to use.

So yes, as discussed in another article recently, Linux is useful, but still not a 100% replacement for Windows.

Oh yes, and remember when MS was one of the "leaders" in selling *nix computers? XENIX was a thing back in the day. Allegedly, Radio Shack was briefly the largest-selling *nix computer with the Model 16 running XENIX; then along came the IBM PC...

 

[Deleted member 28951]

There's a reason Microsoft spent as much time as it did in court and got hit with as many antitrust sentences that it did.

If backward compatibility had been the clincher, *nix already provided, as did MacOS. Arguably a LOT better than windows, as anyone who's tried getting a program written for 3.11, 95, 98, xp, 2000, nt, vista and windows 7 work in other versions can readily attest.

There were reasons Windows ate the consumer market, but backwards compatibility was very much not it.

Nope.
Unix was not a personal computer OS at the time, it ran on PDPs, VAXes and the like, and had a tiny number of commercial programs, and they were not generally useful for small-business or individual use.
I also wrote some SW for Microsoft's version of Unix back then (early 1980s), Xenix, which required the xx286 (it was released in 1980). Some at Microsoft were hoping/expecting Xenix to become its multiuser OS, with it eventually able to run MS-DOS SW as well -- but this never happened AFAIK, and commercial SW authors for whatever reason preferred the primitive DOS environment, possibly because Microsoft charged every OEM selling Xenix a $500/license fee which of course got passed to the retail customer with markup.

Linux was only released a full decade later, so not relevant for the discussion.

MacOS wasn't relevant in the 1980s because the HW was far too slow for the OS which required bitmapped graphics fulltime, and the tiny 9" screen on the Mac wasn't conducive to business SW. So ditto very few SW programs.
The laser printer saved the Mac project, which would otherwise have utterly failed and probably caused Apple to go bankrupt, esp. since it insisted on discontinuing the wildly profitable Apple II/III variants.

WIndows NT was mostly based on DEC's VMS, and was written by a group of programmers MSFT hired from DEC. The original idea was a multi-HW-platform OS, but again, not a personal computer OS but primarily a server OS (in the mid 1990s, Iwas working at a silicon group at DEC, qualifying Ethernet drivers that would work on high-end Intel CPUs as well as PowerPC and DEC Alpha CPUs.)

Backwards compatibility was pretty good among Microsoft OSes (to the point of retaining bugs that violated documented library call specs, so that badly written programs would continue to work, for many years), despite the fact that bugs in general were rampant.

No other system vendor had anywhere near the backwards compatibility until Apple released its PowerPC macs with 68000 emulator for existing SW in 1994 (which worked superbly, with virtually no known non-working SW). However, by then Microsoft's domination was pretty much complete.

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Back compat was huge for businesses. Consumers didn't care nearly as much. Especially when consumer PCs were only just barely a thing.

True, and it needs to be remembered that the original 1-disk drive, no HDD PC with 64KB RAM and 12" monochrome screen cost ~$1600 (in 1982 prices); at the time, consumer PCs (Commodore PC etc.) cost half that (with less RAM and cassette tape as storage device). It took a couple of years until the clones were introduced for DOS PCs to be cheap enough for consumers.

 

[real mikeb_60]

...Backwards compatibility was pretty good among Microsoft OSes (to the point of retaining bugs that violated documented library call specs, so that badly written programs would continue to work, for many years), despite the fact that bugs in general were rampant.

Was kind of amusing that for a while clone compatibility was judged by whether MS Flight Simulator worked without issues. FS used all kinds of undocumented tweaks and tricks to get (barely) adequate performance out of the early x86 DOS and Win3.1 machines. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't innocent of them, though it didn't break things most of the time.

Amusing that Autocad when released (v 1.0) ran on a 2-floppy PC (was much happier on XT with the hard disk). They even demoed a version (never actually released) running on CP/M with a big-memory board (bank-switched RAM was a thing at the time), 8" floppies, and fancy graphics.

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Was kind of amusing that for a while clone compatibility was judged by whether MS Flight Simulator worked without issues. FS used all kinds of undocumented tweaks and tricks to get (barely) adequate performance out of the early x86 DOS and Win3.1 machines. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't innocent of them, though it didn't break things most of the time.

Amusing that Autocad when released (v 1.0) ran on a 2-floppy PC (was much happier on XT with the hard disk). They even demoed a version (never actually released) running on CP/M with a big-memory board (bank-switched RAM was a thing at the time), 8" floppies, and fancy graphics.

The first PC I worked on was when I was in the local AF. We received it in the minimal 64KB, 1-diskette config, despite ordering a decent config, due to upgrades not yet being available.
It could literally run only two things:
The flight simulator (which worked very very well, including supporting a color screen), and its BASIC-in-ROM interpreter. Anything else needed either more RAM or dual-diskette drives (one for the SW application, the 2nd for file storage). You could theoretically swap diskettes back and forth (it would simulate two logical drives on the single physical one), but that was slow and very buggy. IBM's floppy standard was horrifically bad by then-current standards.

 

[real mikeb_60]

The first PC I worked on was when I was in the local AF. We received it in the minimal 64KB, 1-diskette config, despite ordering a decent config, due to upgrades not yet being available.
It could literally run only two things:
The flight simulator (which worked very very well, including supporting a color screen), and its BASIC-in-ROM interpreter. Anything else needed either more RAM or dual-diskette drives (one for the SW application, the 2nd for file storage). You could theoretically swap diskettes back and forth (it would simulate two logical drives on the single physical one), but that was slow and very buggy. IBM's floppy standard was horrifically bad by then-current standards.

The original IBM PC sold well mainly because "you (didn't) get fired for buying IBM" - not actual computing performance And at the time, if you could afford it, IBM did provide decent support, which was often lacking for CP/M and other pre-PC machines. I got most of my support for my Radio Shack Model 1 from Byte and 80 Micro magazines, and while some hardware upgrades were done by the R/S store (which shipped them off to a depot someplace), most were done using generic parts (Teac disc drives & case, cables, etc) acquired in the basement of Brooks Hall at the Computer Faire or at a generic computer store (hauling a Centronics 737 (aka R/W LP4) or Oki 93 printer home on the commute bus was interesting...).

By the time I replaced the R/S with a PC the clones were a lot more reliable than when they started buying Eagles and ITTs at the office, and Flight Sim seemed to be less reliant on trick programming than it was in the 1980s (yes, I had the original FS 1 on my Radio Shack - b/w wire-frame graphics, etc.). IIRC I bought a DAK 386sx by mail order (remember that, before there was a commercial WWW?) that came with a huge collection of software (Wordstar and Quattro Pro were the most heavily used) that quickly filled the little hard disk it came with.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

I'm probably nearly as old-style as you, having started with punch cards and a IBM 360/40 using Assembler and FORTRAN IV. IBM is an interesting case of backward compatibility too, outside of the MS universe, where software written for most 360-series mainframes can still be made to work on the latest z series. There's a FOSS IBM mainframe emulator (Hercules) available for Windows that you can play with, though unless you want to also run a very old freeware version of VM/CMS you might need to spend thousand$ to lease the OS for it. (If you don't mind building from source (except in Windows), a newer version appears to exist at Github.) I've played with that in the past; a couple of my old EXECs still work!

I also tried Linux several times over the years. Frankly, for my purposes, it wasn't useful until recently (last couple of main versions of Mint). Even now, I use several pieces (not an exhaustive list) of Windows software (many but not all of which are old versions designed for Windows 7 or earlier) that simply don't have a useful equivalent in Linux but so far resist use in WINE, including:

• ACD (now CanvasX) Canvas 17 GIS (more recent versions are subscription-only)
• Diamond Cut Audio Restoration Tools ^{* #}
• Open Rails & Train Simulator Route Editor ^*
• Links 2003 & Arnold Palmer Course Designer ^**
• Irfanview ^#
• Windows Character Map ^@
• Cloudflare Warp ^*

Notes:
* Currently supported, but have not been able to port using Wine or otherwise.
** Long out of support, but still works fine in Windows 11. No equivalent in Linux.
# Similar products in Linux are not a direct replacement and are harder to use.
@ Yes, there's a Character Map in Mint (Ubuntu). It's not a replacement, much harder to use.

So yes, as discussed in another article recently, Linux is useful, but still not a 100% replacement for Windows.

Oh yes, and remember when MS was one of the "leaders" in selling *nix computers? XENIX was a thing back in the day. Allegedly, Radio Shack was briefly the largest-selling *nix computer with the Model 16 running XENIX; then along came the IBM PC...

Them were the days. Darnit, even talking about them makes me feel like I should be typing this from a rocking chair on a porch, sporting an old trumpet-style hearing aid and yelling at the clouds.

 

[Deleted member 28951]

Them were the days. Darnit, even talking about them makes me feel like I should be typing this from a rocking chair on a porch, sporting an old trumpet-style hearing aid and yelling at the clouds.

Typing using a KSR-33 Teletype and 110bps (incorrectly called 110baud) modem with acoustic phone coupler...

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Typing using a KSR-33 Teletype and 110bps (incorrectly called 110baud) modem with acoustic phone coupler...

...and now I feel we're just shouting at each other about them good old days over the tea trays at the old folk's home.

We'd better quit it before someone pipes up about that good old vacuum tube tech and how no one knows how to build good vaccuum these days...