[a7776f88862]

I would strongly disagree on the Bill Gates part. The early Microsoft compilers (yes, Microsoft started out as a compiler company) were by all accounts not that great. The really successful and technically impressive Microsoft projects have always been acquisitions. The technically best (or the only decent, depending on who you talk to) Microsoft product is SQL Server, which started out as a Sybase fork.

[not_real_acct]

As I understand it, Microsoft's success is largely because they poached an operating system contract. Basically the CEO of their competition was on a two-week vacation and there was no way to get in contact with him. So the contract went to Microsoft by default. Then Microsoft purchased an existing operating system and hacked it for their client. And the rest is history.

[tinkerteller]

Original interpreter Gates wrote was pretty hard. Imagine flipping switches to enter a program to do entire BASIC interpreter. You are literally entering machine code, not even Assembly. In those days doing any compiler or interpreter was a monumental amount of work and there was a reason Gates was able to sale his work to establish fairly profitable company standing on just one product: BASIC interpreter. He is not in this list for his later successes as businessman or leader but the fact he was able to code this almost single handedly.

[slededit]

He wrote his interpreter on a larger machine (PDP-11 I think), and tested it on an emulator they wrote. When they got to MITS to show off their code that was the first time it ever ran on real hardware.

They did not develop BASIC by flipping switches.

[JoeAltmaier]

I was in high school at the time, and Gate's interpreter was buggy and lame. I could have done better, and knew it at the time.

Fortunately the quality of his software had nothing to do with his success. It was about marketing and business timing.