In article <1992Nov29.180008.3128@news.nd.edu>, dmatiske@virgil.helios.nd.edu (david matiskella) writes:
|>      I think you are a little harsh on Bill Gates. The guy was a great
|>      programmer. HOw many people do you know who have written a basic in 3k?
|>      In addition look at the computers available when MSDOS was written.
|>      Sure Unix was available but it was not going to run on the available
|>      micros. Another thing to consider is that MSDOS was written very
|>      quickly. I keep hearing how great Herd is going to be but when was the
|>      idea first proposed? I remember hearing about it just after the
|>      macintosh was released eight ago. Of course if you can spend several
|>      years designing something you are going to come up with a better system
|>      than if you design and build it in one year.

        There was a belief back in the early days that 'ol Billy boy
        "borrowed" quite a bit for the first Msoft BASIC. Judging from the fact
        they had to buy MSDOS, they couldn't write their own, and the
        quality of Microsoft products through the years I tend to believe
        that rumor.

        The TRS-80 had a 2k Level I BASIC as I remember although level II BASIC
        was based on a Z80 version of the Microsoft Basic + extra stuff. I
        believe Apple's originally had a small BASIC as well not coming from
        Microsoft. I know in the late seventys and early eightys Microsoft
        languages, assemblers and compilers for the TRS-80 were generally
        perceived as inferior to other offerings.

        MSDOS may have been written quickly but NOT by Microsoft some other
        person wrote it, Willy was slick enough to buy it at the right time at
        the right price. There is one programmer on this planet who is kicking
        himself REAL hard for not extracting more blood out of microsoft
        for his QDOS...

                -Rob