When Apple developed the Macintosh Bill Gates and his team were the most important software partner – despited the fact that Microsoft was also the driving force behind the IBM PC and the PC clones. With the rise of the Apple II in the late seventies Microsoft became more and more successful – even before the IBM PC was invented. “He did a great version of BASIC, but then never could buckle down and write the floating-point BASIC we needed, so we ended up later having to make a deal with Microsoft. Later Steve Jobs had to ask for the Microsoft BASIC because his friend Wozniak didn’t finish his own version of NASIC for the Apple II. “He was very childlike,” said Jobs later to the author of hi biography, Walter Isaacson, abou “Woz”.
It also caught the attention of Jobs and Wozniak. Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the magazine and started working on a version of BASIC, an easy-to-use programming language, for the Altair. The Altair wasn’t a real computer -more a $495 pile of parts that had to be soldered to a board that would then do little-but for hobbyists and hackers it heralded the dawn of a new era. The early computer geeks were energized by the arrival of the January 1975 issue of Popular Mechanics, which had on its cover the first personal computer kit, the Altair. I took geniuses and visionary like Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates to invent this new industry. In the early seventies there was no such thing as a personal computer.
In 1997 the Windows-manufacturer helped Steve Jobs saving Apple. Back in the seventies, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates worked close together. Microsoft and Apple have been business partners and tough competitors for many years.
0 kommentar(er)
