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by jojo14 418 days ago
I wouldn't call that an easter egg. IMHO it's rather a backdoor. A covert method to gain access to information about the system. Indeed what is the benefit to the user? No need to feed the mythology about BG. He was not a developer. Period.
1 comments
jodrellblank 418 days ago
No need to try and rewrite history just because you hate M$ or whatever.
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jojo14 417 days ago
I don't hate Micro-soft however I like the truth. Do you know the BASIC was open source ? Wikipedia is your friend.
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jodrellblank 417 days ago
Do you know Bill Gates claimed to program Fortran? [1]

Did you know Joel Spolsky who co-founded StackOverflow and used to project manage Excel at Microsoft described Bill Gates[2] as "amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer." ?

Did you know Raymond Chen of The Old New Thing blog recounted the story[3] "During the development of Windows 3.0, it was customary to have regular meetings with Bill Gates to brief him on the status of the project. At one of the reviews, the topic was performance, and Bill complained, “You guys are spending all this time with your segment tuning tinkering. I could teach a twelve-year-old to segment-tune. I want to see some real optimization, not this segment tuning nonsense. I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake.” (I can’t believe I had to write this: This is a dramatization, not a courtroom transcript.) This “I wrote FAT on an airplane” line was apparently one Bill used when he wanted to complain that what other people was doing wasn’t Real Programming. But this time, the development manager decided she’d had enough. “Fine, Bill. We’ll set you up with a machine fully enlisted in the Windows source code, and you can help us out with some of your programming magic, why don’t you.”"

which, while dramatization, puts Bill Gates in a light where he could code and multiple people knew it and believed it. Compare with another Joel Spolsky comment "the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products. Put Jim Manzi (the suit who let the MBAs take over Lotus) in that meeting and he would be staring blankly. “What’s a rich text edit control?” It never would have occurred to him to take technological leadership because he didn’t grok the technology"

Age 13 he wrote code / debugged for 'Computer Center Corp.' sneaking out to do it[4]

This is multiple people making multiple different but connected claims about someone who founded one of the world's biggest software companies - he claims that he codes, other people claim that he codes, other people call him amazingly technical, other people find it plausible that he was criticising code performance in technical ways and gate(s)keeping 'real programming' as something he did and others weren't doing. You "like the truth" what evidence do you have other than you saying "period"?

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Early-Days-as-a-Computer-Programm...

[2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

[3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20131008-00/?p=30...

[4] https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/business/money-report/at-age...

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