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Paul Allen has died at age 65:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/15/paul-allen-co-founder-microsoft-dies
Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, has died. He was 65.
Allen's company Vulcan said in a statement that he died Monday. Earlier this month Allen said the cancer he was treated for in 2009, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, had returned.
Allen, who was an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks.
Of course the article has more information. There was more to Paul Allen that just mentioned above. Bound to hit multiple sources with different takes so be on the lookout for something from a source you like.
takyon: Allen Institute bio and Vulcan Inc. statement.
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:36PM (4 children)
My personal experience with OS/2 Warp was not good. The cool part was that it could run DOS programs noticeably faster than DOS could. Paid $80 for it, only to learn after I'd opened the package that networking was not included. If I wanted networking, that would be an additional package for another $150 to $170. That was a deal killer. Showed me that IBM didn't get it, didn't get that networking was the future. Or, perhaps they did get it, and thought to gouge customers with this shabby treatment in which all important networking capability was held back, until customers coughed up lots more money. Whichever, that was stupid of IBM and I was very unhappy with that omission. They fooled me once, and I sure wasn't going to bite on another piece only to find out something more was not working or not included.
IBM had a window of opportunity in the early 1990s, as Microsoft themselves bumbled about and sneered at networking as something that end users didn't really need. Took MS a year or two to start taking networking seriously and get cracking on Internet Explorer and what eventually became Windows 95. IBM rolled out OS/2 first, and could have really hurt MS if they hadn't blown it with their own stupid networking move.
That's just one of several times I've been burned by commercial software. Like, another networking fail was Master of Orion 2, which was shipped without the multiplayer over a network feature finished and working. Struggled for hours to get that part to work, not knowing that those jerks had done that. Some 3 months later, they released a "patch" that "fixed" the "bugs" with networked multiplayer. Liars.
As for Paul Allen, I haven't noticed much about him beyond his role as a founder of MS. Sure, founded a few charity and research organizations, but mostly it seems he played around with big sports teams. What's with the likes of Cuban and Allen wanting to bother with a sports team?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 16 2018, @01:36PM (3 children)
You sure?
I still remember "net share/use..." with LANs on coax cables on MS-DOS 3.5/4.x
And Trumpet Winsock [thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com] - it was Win3.11 with a US Robotics modem and Trumpet that got me to sunsite.unc.edu and/or ftp.funet.fi for the earliest linux floppies. Sometime in 1995 if my memory still serves.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
Oh yes, even if MS was on board with LANs, circa 1992 they were definitely pooh poohing the whole idea of the Internet. Supposedly Bill Gates himself was the person who realized that attitude was wrong and lead the change in opinion, turned MS around. But that may be giving Gates too much credit, and there are hints that "genius founder personally saves the company from a grave strategic blunder" was some revisionist history.
And was not Trumpet Winsock 3rd party software? Because at that time Microsoft was dropping the ball?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:29PM
As the boss, only Gates was in a position to turn MS around, but at one time he was actually resisting including TCP/IP capability in Windows. The earlier versions of Windows 95 did not even have Internet Explorer installed by default. He only turned round after nearly everyone else in the World (including his own staff) was goading or laughing at him for being behind the curve. So much for the "Great Seer".
Whatever MS did as a company, Gates must be held personally responsible for his book "The Road Ahead", and in the first edition (late 1995) it is clear that he missed the point of the internet. The book was received with some derision by knowledgable reviewers; The New York Times for example said that Gates "has been caught flat-footed by [the Internet's] sudden emergence". Gates (or his ghost writer) hastily produced a revised second edition in response to the criticism; MS company policy was also revised. I like to say that Gates' "Road Ahead" contained a U-turn.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:57PM
And Trumpet Winsock [thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com] - it was Win3.11 with a US Robotics modem and Trumpet that got me to sunsite.unc.edu and/or ftp.funet.fi for the earliest linux floppies. Sometime in 1995 if my memory still serves.
He had to be forced / tricked into shipping with a TCP/IP stack by his underlings. He was against it. If you can find the story it is interesting. Furthermore, though it has also mostly been erased from the WWW, Bill Gates was calling the Internet a passing fad [wired.com] as late as the second half of the 1990's.
Back to OS/2, the reason that could not take off was because Bill had promised IBM to develop applications for it. IBM and M$ had been partners in developing OS/2 but M$ would stand for the lion's share of initial applications. However, weeks before launch, Bill let IBM know that 1) M$ would not be delivering any OS/2 applications, and 2) M$ had been using the time and resources that would have gone to OS/2 for developing Windows-only applications. There was no time for IBM to pick up the mess before launch. Also M$ ran a successful vaporware campaign with the help of the trade press getting most of the market to "wait and see" what Windows would become. That dragged on for a few years before M$ delivered even half-baked product and people had gotten used to not buying OS/2 by then.
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