Need More Coffee

[granz]

Don't forget that they started out as a complete fraud: they didn't have a BASIC when they told MITS that they had one for the Altair. They didn't even have an Intel 8080, they wrote an emulator for a DEC PDP-11 (IIRC) and wrote BASIC on that (pretty good work, I'll admit - but still fraud.)

It makes one wonder what they did at Traf-O-Data, was that fraudulent, or did they steal that stuff, too?

[Chris Savage]

It makes one wonder what they did at Traf-O-Data, was that fraudulent, or did they steal that stuff, too?

Now you're outside of the realm of things I know about. I didn't even get into the PC market and had never touched one until shortly after Commodore went out of business. By then I think the 386 was the current PC. Although I started with some old IBM PS/2 machines (286?) and even some older stuff. But the IBM / DOS history was already written then.

[granz]

It makes one wonder what they did at Traf-O-Data, was that fraudulent, or did they steal that stuff, too?

Now you're outside of the realm of things I know about. I didn't even get into the PC market and had never touched one until shortly after Commodore went out of business. By then I think the 386 was the current PC. Although I started with some old IBM PS/2 machines (286?) and even some older stuff. But the IBM / DOS history was already written then.

I was twenty-two when IBM started shipping the PC, and had been into computing for eight years. I remember quite clearly the feelings of the giant getting into personal computing, and completely ignoring the rest of the industry standards (CP/M - although that appears to have been Gary Kildall's fault, S-100, etc.)

What really stuck in my craw was Bill Gates calling me (and every other computer hobbyist in the world) a thief (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists.) That got even more annoying when I found out how much Micro Soft (later MicroSoft) had been stealing from their competitors.

[Chris Savage]

Crazy history...thanks for sharing.