Hacker Remix

Microsoft employees recall their early years

152 points by rmason 4 days ago | 121 comments

Taniwha 17 hours ago

When I was at uni in NZ (mid 70s) me and my friends wrote a compiler for 6800s (an algol subset, it fit in 2k), we wrote it with copyrights for "uSoft" (that's a greek mu), in retrospect it was an obvious name at the time.

Later we discovered some other guys using the same name in the US (also with a mu) they had a basic interpreter, how lame! (we had a compiler) however we really didn't understand the advantages of being born in the right place .....

I really wish we'd incorporated, we could have sold the name for some silly amount of money

jll29 17 hours ago

Not just "incorporated", you would also have to have ported it to various computers that were sold (as MSFT did - and that Bill Gates' parents were lawyers with IBM contacts helped a lot).

NZ is a fantastic country, but is relatively remote from larger markets, and its own population isn't large enough for the economics of scale to apply only locally. So even if you had tried, you may have failed. As you rightly say, power of location. On the other hand, now, due to globalization, things are possible there, too - for example, the app market is not limited geographically.

BTW, you should consider uploading your old compiler's code on GitHub if you still have it; there is increased interest in "software archeology" now, given that so many emulators have been built.

Taniwha 14 hours ago

I was more talking about owning the name in NZ (and maybe Oz)

The software source was on cards (developed on a simulator on a uni mainframe, much like Microsoft were developing their code), sadly the cards were left behind when I moved to the US a decade later

ErigmolCt 15 hours ago

That's such a great story and such a classic case of being just ahead of the curve but in the wrong corner of the world.

Rodeoclash 14 hours ago

I worked in a digital technology company in Wellington in the 90s and one of our key technologies that we sold was a hosted form on a secure (remember, this is the era that https was not common) website to collect credit card payments. We were a proto Stripe in the year 1999 but totally in the wrong place in the world to take advantage of it.

ska 7 hours ago

May have been the wrong time too. 1999 was chock full of companies that failed to get traction and died during the dot-com collapse, but variants became much more successful 20 years later. Much of this was mostly waiting in infrastructure I suspect.

rollcat 16 hours ago

It's also almost 50 years since "An Open Letter to Hobbyists"[1]. It's amazing that in the last 30+ years, the "hobbyists" managed to turn the entire software industry by 180°, and that Microsoft themselves are reliant on that work.

Bill even specifically mentions musicians. By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it. Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

[2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

qoez 9 hours ago

Devils advocate: Imagine how much richer developers would have been today if software wasn't copied as much as it is today. Companies would have to pay developers to write it (we probably wouldn't have as much overall growth but devs would be richer). AI also wouldn't have been able to replace us if it was more secretive and proprietary.

azemetre 9 hours ago

Imagine how much public good can be done if the government had public software works project that did not need to rely on advertising to be useful while serving everyone (not just a boardroom of millionaires).

anon_e-moose 16 hours ago

> Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].

> [2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

Nice try ChatGPT stealing from studio ghibli and Scarlett Johansson are still two egregious examples of what can kill artist's motivations. Why create or publish if credit is not given?

rollcat 11 hours ago

True, virtually all companies harvesting LLM training datasets don't bother honouring even the most permissive licenses, like MIT or BSD - Microsoft leading the pack with Github and Copilot.

You're right to point out that the tide is shifting again. Perhaps at the end of this bubble, society and/or the behemoth companies will recognise the value and help build a more sustainable future for artists and creators. I'm cautiously optimistic.

robertlagrant 14 hours ago

Downvote for low quality "nice try".

Ylpertnodi 14 hours ago

>By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it.

I do enjoy some Led Zeppelin, and I often enjoy the artists they didn't credit, even more.

pjmlp 13 hours ago

And now most of those hobbists are going back to commercial licenses, because other hobbists don't pay them, and there are bills to pay.

zozbot234 13 hours ago

> And now most of those hobbists are going back to commercial licenses

It seems to be specifically the "hobbyists" that are also taking VC investment money for their "hobby project". It's pretty clear what's driving these decisions: VC's are not okay with a bootstrapped, penny-pinching business focusing on specialized support or custom development (which is the successful RedHat model), they want an early chance at really outsized returns.

pjmlp 13 hours ago

Back in the day that letter was relevant we used to sell little tools via ads on magazines like BYTE, Dr Dobbs Journal and co, occasionally get nice money out of it.

Also in the early BSD/Linux days, there were distributors like Walnut Creek, Amiga had Fish Disks, and so forth, some money could eventually go back to tool writers.

It isn't only about VC money.

warmandsoft 4 hours ago

[...] "Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge. They are a company with vicious, predatory, anti-competitive business practices, and always have been. They also happen to make terrible products, and always have. I do not use any Microsoft products, and neither should you." - Jamie Zawinski

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-windows.html

unclad5968 4 hours ago

That guy hates MS because they included a web browser with their OS? Then he complains about being sent porn when he asks people to stop redistribution of his permissively licensed project while he shows me a hairy scrotum.

Seems a little irrational.

weard_beard 4 hours ago

Stress is a minor form of torture.

Torture itself is irrational, but so are the things that humans will do or say when subjected to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghczTVgav0

bustling-noose 19 hours ago

While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore, I think Windows defines the brand much like how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it.

What I am curious about is what happens when the original product that makes the company popular starts to experience poor quality. Take Google for example, its search has been on a decline in the last decade or so and needless to say the company is experiencing problems as well in the last few years. While GCP and GSuite are significant, people have lost faith in Google which probably started with search.

Windows 11 and the iPhone seem to be heading towards same fate as Google search imo.

art0rz 17 hours ago

The only people losing faith in Google (search) are power users such as us. Regular users haven't noticed the decline, and search may even have improved for them. We are not Google Search's target audience. We need to stop pretending all products are built for the power user niche.

TheOtherHobbes 9 hours ago

Regular users have absolutely noticed the decline. A number of people I know have mentioned it to me unprompted. None of them are power users or even particularly tech-oriented.

kenjackson 8 hours ago

A lot of non-power users are complementing Google search with ChatGPT. The main reason is that it will give an answer to more specific questions. Like “what are some quotes famous athletes have said about Usain Bolt”.

throwaway2037 8 hours ago

    > Like “what are some quotes famous athletes have said about Usain Bolt”.

What a strange counterexample. When I try exactly that search in Google, I get a nice list of quotes from "AI Overview" in the results.

kenjackson 6 hours ago

I thought they were talking about the traditional blue links Google search results, not the AI returned results. Then sure -- ChatGPT, Gemini, etc... I put them all in the same bucket as complementary. Interestingtly though, I don't get the AI Overview on mobile, so there I'd have to explicitly go to an LLM focused interface.

surajrmal 16 hours ago

I'm a so called power user and don't really understand why everyone says it's worse. Google is better than ever. The problem I've seen is folks using older techniques for searching that don't really make sense anymore.

ido 12 hours ago

What are the newer searching techniques that make more sense?

tuyiown 12 hours ago

I don't see how exact search string can lose its sense. But it does yield "no results", more often than before even if the string has to be publicly available somewhere, in a source I could make sense of.

I can see how google can be seen as better in some ways, but brushing all case where it's worse as irrelevant looks like an easy shortcut to shut down complains without caring if they might be legit.

owebmaster 11 hours ago

> I've seen is folks using older techniques for searching that don't really make sense anymore.

Like typing what you want to search in the search input and hit enter?

jajko 15 hours ago

My wife is an opposite of power user and she now uses mostly chatgpt for anything more complex. The ease with fluent sentence search compared to trying to fit those few right terms that google search would understand, not overdo it, avoid over-SEO-ed pages... google search has been gamed for so long it became victim of its own success. It just has momentum but thats waning.

Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to something else but right now its night and day even for common folks. Who cares knows it.

Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search like nytimes with their paid very selective biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.

alister 13 hours ago

> we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner

For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the products they test and they don't take gifts or manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising. They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants, and have been in existence for 89 years.

Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14 manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.

https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-cleaners/r...

croissants 6 hours ago

+1 for Consumer Reports. They're not expensive either, something like $5 per month. If they keep you from buying a bad fridge, it pays for itself!

Their recentish coverage of lead in foods is a bit embarrassing though, since they used a California standard for dosage limits that even the EU would blush at.

throwaway2037 8 hours ago

I love this response, and I agree 100% with your suggestion, but, isn't it obvious? They didn't want to pay for high quality information. Instead, they needed to wade through rubbish "unpaid"/"free" search results. Or in their own words: "Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search".

tiffanyh 10 hours ago

> While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore

It’s hasn’t been for 25+ years (more than 50% of Microsoft existence).

  1998 Revenue Breakdown
  —————————————————————-
  $7.04B Productivity Apps
  $6.28B Windows
  $4.72B OEM
  $1.94B Consumer

https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar00/mdna.htm

throwaway2037 8 hours ago

    > Productivity Apps

MS Office?

    > OEM

Combination of Windows and MS Office licenses purchased by OEMs?

    > Consumer

What is this? People who buy shink-wrapped software at retail stores?

unregistereddev 7 hours ago

Productivity apps would be MS Office, yes, as well as separately-purchased licenses for Publisher (and I'm sure there were several other apps at the time). I do not know whether this category would include Visual C++ or Visual Basic licenses, but I suspect it did.

I think you are correct on the OEM vs Consumer split. Long-forgotten memory: For awhile people would resell OEM software licenses online. OEM software licenses could only be sold as a bundle with PC hardware. But that limitation did not specify /what/ PC hardware or that it had to be an entire working system. So resellers would collect outdated 1MB SIMM memory cards or other small, cheap, outdated components and package them with the CDROM.

pjmlp 13 hours ago

Still, from all computing platforms that I have used since my humble Timex 2068 in 1986, Windows is where I have most fun, despite all the ongoing issues.

paxys 9 hours ago

> how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it

iPhone defines Apple, and that is justified considering the single product makes up 55% of the company's revenue.

RajT88 8 hours ago

When I first heard that, I thought it was an insane factoid.

But then I realized that slowly over time, iPhones grew to get into the price range of full-on computers. And also, even the cheaper iPhones add in up sales when you sell over a billion of them.