Sometimes, this blog will venture into the deep past...
In 2006, the news that Bill Gates was about to retire made me think. His move to give away money to good causes and to gradually remove the heavy yoke of incredibly unbelievable wealth, had given pause to some of us. Gates was championed by many, and criticized by many too. My long-time colleague, Rich Seeley drolly summed it: "This may be like when Ali left boxing; software may never be as fun without Gates to kick around."
At the time, I wrote: I'd been in the hardware trade press for 10 years when my boss assigned me to cover a Microsoft product rollout in Atlanta. Call it a simple twist of fate. It was 1991. Of course I'd heard of Bill Gates, but he was in the software business, and of just about no interest to us.
If he'd been doing assembler, of course, that would have been of a whole lot of interest, but he was doing Basic, which "real men" didn't do, back in those hardware circles. But the company was on the rise, and the boss sent me. The product rolling out, in fact, was Visual Basic, which has just lately turned 15.
There was tension in the air at the launch as we waited for the keynote speaker. Then, Bill Gates came out and just about everybody stood up and cheered clamorously. In those days hardware trade journalists didn't applaud (politely or otherwise) at the end of an industry executive's speech, much less stand up when they just appeared on stage. So I covered the story of the birth of Visual Basic, and had one eye on the rapt audience as I did so.
Later on I caught on to the fact that Bill Gates had become the richest man in the world and people were fascinated by that mere fact. Of course, there was real excitement about Visual Basic and Microsoft because the software was enabling for people who grew up during the batch processing era, when gatekeepers in smocks stood between you and the problem you wanted to crunch on.
Read the rest of the story -
Halcyon days of the VB scripters
No comments:
Post a Comment