Now that Bill Gates, along with his doctor friend (Fauci), is making an overt move to take over the world via medicine, the time may have come for the American people to have a better understanding of the history of Gates and his Microsoft Empire.
For that, you have to go back to the early 1970s when microprocessors were being used to control traffic lights and fuel injection systems in cars. Some bright person noticed that it would be fairly easy to use those components to construct a microcomputer for the common man. Following that, you had a space of five or six years during which computers with 8-bit data buses and the same 8-bit microchips were being sold to the public. Those microcomputers were very limited. They had both eight bit computer registers and 8-bit data paths, 16 to 64,000 bytes of RAM memory, and a floppy disk.
You had dbase, a primitive spreadsheet, and a word processor (WordStar) for software on those computers and the main thing which made anybody want them was the fact of the worst computer/wordprocessor in the world being hugely better than the best typewriter.
A new generation of 16 or 32 bit microprocessors was on the way by the late 1970s. The specification for the Motorola 68000 family of microchips was out and Intel’s 8086 microprocessor was out by 1978. There were 200 or 300 bright little companies in Silicon Valley which were gearing up to produce powerful microcomputers using those kind of chips and various light and fast versions of UNIX. Those people took a look at the very limited and segmented architecture of the 16-bit 8086 chip and also at the specs for the 68000 chip which was due out in 1980 and told Intel (“Thanks but no thanks, we would rather wait the two years for real architecture”. In other words, the natural decision of the American OEM microcomputer industry was to allow Intel to die the death which it richly deserved. At that point, had Intel been a Japanese company, the president, all officers, and members of the Board of Directors would have committed sepuku, that would have been more shame than they could have lived with.
Nonetheless, beginning in 1980 or thereabouts, IBM and Microsoft, via the introduction of the original IBM PC along with a gigantic marketing campaign, reversed the entire natural decision of the marketplace and, three or four years later, neearly all those bright little companies which had been planning to market 68000 based microcomputers, were lying around dead.
Even as early on as 1981, a typical one of the kinds of Motorola – based microcomputers I mention had an 8 MHz 68000 chip, a 10 or 20 MB hard drive, a floppy disk, ½ MB or megabyte of RAM memory, a light and fast version of UNIX, and several full-blown major programming languages. In other words, a fully functional modern computer for less than $10,000. Nearly all of those computers had been killed off by the IBM PC, which was a crippled toy by comparison.
The first time that the PC World ever really caught up to that was in 1989 or thereabouts with the introduction of the Intel 386 and 486 microchips, which at least had direct addressing of memory above 64 kB. IBM and Bill Gates cost the United States nearly 10 years worth of technological innovation.
In 1993, with the HAL (Houston Area League of PC users) shoot out, Gates did it again. That shootout was an unrehearsed comparison between the then current version of Windows NT and that good IBM version of OS/2 with its good 32-bit presentation manager. The demo was an unholy disaster for Microsoft, an unmitigated horror show in which OS/2 completely wiped the floor with Windows NT, doing an entirely good job of everything users put in front of it for testing while Windows NT failed miserably at nearly every one of those tests. By all rights, that should have been the end of Microsoft as an operating system vendor.
That isn’t what happened. Microsoft told software developers that if they wrote software for OS/2, they would be out of the loop and would never have the information it would take to write software for 32-bit Windows, WHEN it arrived. Everybody folded, and the good 32 bit version of OS/2, like the Motorola based microcomputers a decade earlier, was left to wither and die on the vine.
The first product which Microsoft had which was comparable to that early version of OS/2, was Windows NT 4 which came out in 1996 or thereabouts. The problem with that of course is that, the next time the United States has the wait for five or six years for Microsoft to catch up, it might be Japan or China or India which catches up.
For his next trick, Gates set about engineering the wholesale and wanton destruction of the entire United States software industry. Victims included Borland, WordPerfect, Dbase, Netscape, Corel, and any number of others. The case of Borland was particularly horrible. As nearly as I can tell, Borland never made any kind of a mistake or bad move with its products. It was simply dogged and hounded to death, every one of its products having to compete with cheaper and inferior Microsoft products which were backed by giant marketing campaigns.
All of this was before Gates embarked upon his crusade to take over the world with healthcare and COVID-19 of course… Gates has set the American computer software world back at least two decades from where it should be by now. How far back he could set the United States if his medical scheme should come to fruition, nobody could do more than guess.
You might be talking about a century or longer.