MSimon wrote:Bill Gates does have his good points.
He (with IBM's help) unified operating systems at a time when there was a lot of confusion in the market..
You give him too much credit. The market unified operating systems.
I recall this period VERY well. In the 70s when microcomputers were first becoming popular we had the TRS80, The APPLE II, The Amiga, Lisa, Commodore 64, Ohio Scientific, the Pet, etc.
People would buy a computer to do wordprocessing and inventory for their small buisness, and the very next time they tried to upgrade, the new machine wouldn't use any of their old records or data, requiring them to laborously transcribe everything they wanted to keep.
People were frustrated by the lack of compatibility between systems, and when IBm announced they were producing a personal computer, people thought they would finally be able to buy a low cost "Professional" computer from a well known name in buisness. No more "Toy" computers for small buisness!
What made Bill Gates wealthy is Backward compatibility, and he created it unintentionally , as opposed to doing it purposefully. He got IBm to grant him ownership of DOS, which they had never done with any company before, and they only did so because they expected DOS to be very short lived as a result of their OS2 which they believed to be quickly forthcomming.
OS2 didn't get out fast enough, and DOS became the defacto (default) standard. Bill Gates owned it, and therefore became inadvertently wealthy.
Backward Compatibility was an idea whose time had come, and Bill Gates happened to be lucky enough to be riding that horse when the market decided that's what they wanted.
Bill Gates ought to be a nobody. He simply won the lottery.
One of these days i'm going to have to take a look at fourth to see why you advocate it so strongly.MSimon wrote: What is really holding back computing these days is the dominance of the C, C++, Intel model of computing. The processors are overly complex and the language is clumsy.
Fortunately we are running into fundamental limits (the speed of light) which will eventually force on us a different way of doing things.
The deal is this: you can't design a small processor where C is the native language. FORTH on the other hand.....
In fact FORTH was based originally on the Turing idea that any processor can be made (with the right instructions) to emulate any other processor. Now a days we can skip the emulation process and go straight to silicon.
David