textfiles/computers/bill

Bill Gates Interview by (PC-Magazine)

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REMEMBERING THE BEGINNING
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PC MAGAZINE:

15 years is a surprising amount of time in some ways.
Obviously the PC industry goes back further, but the IBM PC
changed it a lot. It changed the way people thought about
computers.

BILL GATES :

It absolutely did. For the IBM PC, the key market was a
hobbyist market. We'd gotten floppy disks, so we'd start to get into
some more serious applications. But, both the power of the machine,
because it was the first 16-bit machine, and the endorsement by IBM of
using a personal computer, and then the critical mass of software and
distribution and peripherals that came along with that, makes it the
biggest milestone in the history of personal computing. It was a sea change.
Of course, one of the big developments around it was that before the IBM-PC
came along, machines were essentially incompatible with each other. In those
first few years, [we saw] the whole notion of how compatible was compatible,
there were many different levels there. And a lot of hardware manufacturers
still felt they had more freedom to deviate a little bit and do things that
couldn't be virtualized by a common software interface.
So, in those first two years a lot of key things were established: the idea
of compatibility; MS-DOS as the primary system as opposed to CP/M-86 or UCSD
P-System which were the prime competitors; and the whole thing about a broad
software industry and using indirect distribution channels. Anyway, it was a
monumental change.

PC MAGAZINE:

Let's go back -- go back to that first 1982 PC Magazine
interview. You know, "The Man Behind the Machine." Microsoft was involved
with IBM to what at the time was an unprecedented degree. You had written
software for lots of other machines at that point, not operating systems but
BASICs and things like that. How different was it?

BILL GATES :

Well, for IBM it was extremely different because this was a
project where they let a supplier -- a partner, whatever you call us --
shape the definition of the machine and provide fundamental elements of
the machine. When they first came to us, their concept was to do an 8-bit
computer. And the project was more notable because they were going to do
it so quickly and use an outside company. It wouldn't be a high-volume
product. Their charge was to do a home and a very low-end business machine.
They had the Data Master, which was 8085-based at the time, that they felt
was covering part of the business market. Then they had the 5100, the
machine that had both an APL and a BASIC interpreter, which was covering
another part of the business market. So it was sort of a home-down business
machine. And it was a very small team in Boca that wanted to prove that IBM
could do a product, any kind of product, in about an 18-month cycle. And
that was the most novel<65>that was going to be the novel thing was: could
you work with outsiders, which in this case was mostly ourselves but also
Intel, and do it quickly?
And the key engineer on the project, Lou Eggebrecht, was fast-moving. Once
we convinced IBM to go 16-bit (and we looked at 68000 which unfortunately
wasn't debugged at the time so decided to go 8086), he cranked out that
motherboard in about 40 days. It's one of the most phenomenal projects
because there were very small resources involved and we had to ROM the
BASIC which meant that it was essentially cast in concrete, so you couldn't
make much in the way of mistakes. We actually did this clever thing where for
disk versions of the system, we put enough hooks in the ROM that you could
place reasonably modular parts of the ROM.
So it was very lucky when it turned out about a year after the machine
shipped, there was a floating point bug and the New York Times ran it, we
could just issue a disk that patched out that part of the floating point
package because virtually all the machines that had been shipped were
disk-based,. What I had done was made the dispatch table hookable. It was
a very tricky project because the machine had to boot running only BASIC,
or if it detected a disk, it had to boot with the operating system. And
if only the BASIC came in, the we had to do file management against the
audiocassette. And they insisted that it run in a 48k configuration which
was pretty tricky; we were hoping they'd insist on 64k. Now, it turned
out most people bought 128k versions of the machine.

PC MAGAZINE:

Didn't the original machine come out with 16k?

BILL GATES :

The cheapest machine you could buy -- yeah you're right,
you're right: if you were cassette only, it was 16. And then if you
got the disk you could be 48. And, it was actually fairly complicated
because the ROM is up in very high memory, that is, it's at a different
segment address. The whole idea of where we use long addresses, where we
use short addresses. The 8086 architecture -- now that we have flat
memory model, people forget that a segmented memory model is a fairly
complex thing to work with. It actually got worse before it got better.
We went to the 286 which was very segment-oriented before we finally got
just straight, linear address space in 1986.

PC MAGAZINE:

And not in the operating system until after that.

BILL GATES :

That's right.

PC MAGAZINE:

That's significant.

BILL GATES :

Well, people had written applications to use real addresses --
DOS applications depended on the fact that there was not a level of
indirection: that is that you simply shifted the segment value and added
it in. So we had to keep running Real Mode Applications<6E>I mean today you
can buy an IBM PC and run a Real Mode Application. I mean it'd actually
be interesting to take those applications that shipped with the original
PC and plug them in. I'm pretty sure they'd work. I admit I haven't tried
it. The first applications were an adventure game from us, a typing tutor
from us, and then VisiCalc.

PC MAGAZINE:

Yes and Easy Writer.

BILL GATES :

Was Easy Writer there at the very beginning? I think it was.
So none of the early applications have successful follow-ons. Now the early
language tools included our BASIC compiler, our FORTRAN, and actually at
those times we offered a PASCAL and a COBOL compiler as well.

PC MAGAZINE:

Obviously, back then you were talking about DOS as the standard.
I mean you were telling people to write to MS-DOS, not to go around it to
the hardware and all that. Of course, the programs that became most
successful in those days of the applications, did go around it. IBM
became hardware-dependent, which of course was then copied a lot. Was
that a surprise to you?

BILL GATES :

No, not at all. I mean, remember we were the big promoters of
the bit-map graphics. We were really against this there were two video
cards. There was CGA, which we pushed for, unfortunately only got 640 by 200
graphics into it and the palate was limited. It was just at the last minute
they gave us a tiny bit of a palate where color 0 could be mapped to 16,
and colors 1, 2 and 3 had a flip where they could be one set or another.
Anyway, the character cells on the CGA were 8 by 8 so they didn't look
as good as the Character Mode Only card. Because that was actually,
although it didn't have bit-map graphics, what IBM calls All Points
Address (APA) graphics. So it was actually 640 by 350 so the character
cells were much larger and looked a lot better. It was the Display
Writer character cell size. So IBM thought a lot of people would buy
that character mode card, which meant you couldn't do graphs and things.
But the only way to do graphics was to [write code directly to the hardware.
So all our applications that did graphics did that as well. It was only
later that we decided we could provide some high-level services and get
enough efficiency that graphics applications would go through the
operating system.
The definition of what it means to be a graphics application changed.
In the early days it meant you had a mode where a chart would come up.
Like when you ran Lotus 1-2-3, most of the time you were in character
mode, where the scrolling was very fast. Now at days we have processors
that are fast enough to scroll the bit map display and you don't even
think about it. Back then, just scrolling the display in graphics mode,
was noticeably, significantly, painfully slower than scrolling the
display in character mode because you have eight times as many bits
to push around and these processors were quite slow processors.