Paul Graham on great hackers - Microsoft [LWN.net]

Paul Graham on great hackers - Microsoft

Posted Jul 30, 2004 9:04 UTC (Fri) by jeroen (subscriber, #12372)
In reply to: Paul Graham on great hackers - Microsoft by mbp
Parent article: Paul Graham on great hackers

To some extent, in the old days, Microsoft probably did have a strong culture of good hackers, though with a different emphasis. Now they've just got big and clumsy, as most institutions do eventually.

What great things have they hacked? AFAIK they only bought software. MS-DOS was bought, not created by them, for example.

Other than that, I don't consider "the letter to the hobbyist" anything hacker-like. Hackers have certain ethics, Bill Gates doesn't have those.

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Paul Graham on great hackers - Microsoft

Posted Jul 30, 2004 11:02 UTC (Fri) by alland (guest, #23581) [Link]

>What great things have they hacked? AFAIK they only bought software. MS-DOS was bought, not created by them, for example.
>
>Other than that, I don't consider "the letter to the hobbyist" anything hacker-like. Hackers have certain ethics, Bill Gates doesn't have those.

Billy boy created a BASIC implementation that ran on CP/M, along with M80/L80 assembler/linker, and F80 FORTRAN.

None of these were any better than their latest products wrt bugs and "features". I was able to replace M80/L80 with a product from SLR Systems that was an order of magnitude faster, and did virtual linking to get a program that would fill 62 of the 64K memory space.