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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   35617 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. [...]

Bill Gates folllowed that model.

As some of you might know, Gates made his fortune leading a company called "Microsoft" in the 80s and 90s.

It is somewhat of an understatement to say that the Microsoft of that era was not generally seen as a force for good. They were the most hated company on the net in that era. Their software (i.e. Windows 95, 98, ME) was garbage. Its security was atrocious. Their marketplace behavior was anti-competitive. Their 'innovations' were things like a fucking talking paperclip which would try to distract you in word.

Basically, I stopped hating them when I stopped using their crap for serious work. Recent iterations of windows are tolerable as an operating system for a gaming-only machine, though.

I think that Gates has reached net good with his philanthropy, but to claim that MS was his real contribution to humanity is absurd.

Edit: made misinterpreted quotation more accurate.

Isn't that kind of a "programmer" perspective on Microsoft? From a normie perspective, Microsoft brought computers to the masses and made them useful to normal people.

  • Instead of typing cryptic commands into a terminal, you could just click buttons with a GUI
  • Yes, I know, Apple also had that in the Lisa and Macintosh. But those cost $10,000 in 1980s money, so no normal person could afford them.
  • Yes, I know, Xerox had it even earlier. Again, no normal person could afford that or even knew that it existed.
  • Instead of trying to choose between 12 different competing brands of computer that all ran totally different software, Microsoft made it easy by dominating the market with one standard that could run almost any kind of software
  • Microsoft didn't just sell computers, they came prepackaged with a bunch of useful software so that it would "just work" right out of the box. Tech nerds might call that an exploitive monopoly, but normal people were pretty happy that they could easily write a document, run a spreadsheet, or get an email on this complicated gadget which they had spent a month's salary on, without having to do some complicated "software installation" process. Hell, even just Freecell and Minesweeper were mindblowing to people back then, when the alternative was ordering game installation floppy disks by a mail-order catalogue, or programming them yourself.
  • A lot of their security problems were just because they had so many users, and so many hackers targeted them. Nobody bothered to target Unix or Apple back then because it simply wasn't worth it. But I'm sure they also had security problems that could have been targeted if "rich old boomer boss" had started using them en masse. hell, Richard Stallmen in his early years was notorious for hacking into people's accounts at MIT and changing their password because he believed that noone really needed a private password.
  • In general, they just did what any corporation does... try to make money. IBM and Intel were exactly the same. Commodore under Jack Tramiel was even worse. The early hackers like Steve Woz were just too naive to understand how the world works. They thought they could just give away everything for free in live in a hippy paradise forever.

Instead of typing cryptic commands into a terminal, you could just click buttons with a GUI

LOL.

Yes, I know, Apple also had that in the Lisa and Macintosh. But those cost $10,000 in 1980s money, so no normal person could afford them.

The Mac cost $2500 in 1984 dollars, not $10,000.

Microsoft didn't just sell computers, they came prepackaged with a bunch of useful software so that it would "just work" right out of the box.

Again, LOL. The original Mac came with a word processor and a drawing program.

First, $2500 was still a heck of a lot of money for a home computer in the 1980s. Its main competition were around $1000. Second, the original Mac in its launch state was woefully underpowered (https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/)

Those realities could be hellish. The single floppy drive combined with the inadequate memory could make the original Mac as excruciating to actually use as it was fun to wax poetic about, with the process of just copying a single disk requiring more than fifty disk swaps and twenty minutes. MacWrite, the Mac’s flagship version of that bedrock of business applications the word processor, was so starved for memory that you could only create a document of about eight pages. Determined Mac zealots swapped tips on how to chain files together to craft their Great American Novels, while the business world just shrugged and turned back to their ugly but functional WordStar screens. The Mac was a toy, at best an interesting curiosity; IBM was still the choice for real work.

Those problems were eventually solved, but they required even more expensive versions of the Mac plus expensive peripherals:

Apple’s empire would be a very exclusive place. By the time you’d bought a monitor, video card, hard drive, keyboard — yes, even the keyboard was a separate item — and other needful accessories, a Mac II system could rise uncomfortably close to the $10,000 mark.

First, $2500 was still a heck of a lot of money for a home computer in the 1980s.

You set the goal posts in the first place; leave them where they were. IBMs competition at the time was the PC-XT, introduced 10 months earlier. It cost twice as much.

you're just nitpicking. Apple computers were always more expensive than other brands, and the Macintosh was considered expensive even by Apple's standards. There were many, many types of IBM and IBM computers at that time, which mostly cost a lot less. Going from Google... (https://www.neowin.net/news/the-ibm-pc-xt-launched-40-years-ago-today-but-it-got-competition-from-the-compaq-portable/)

The original IBM PC had a starting price of $1,565 when it launched in 1981 according to PC Mag. By contrast, the price for the first model of the IBM PC-XT was a whopping $7,545

So the Pc_XT was also an expensive high end computer. On the other end, you could get a commodore 64 for just a few hundred dollars.

Anyway my original point was that Microsoft isn't some uniquely evil company. They just sold a lot of software to anyone who wanted to buy it, unlike Apple with their little walled garden of Apple-only software.

You built your claims that Microsoft actually did what Apple is justly famous for doing on a foundation of false facts, and I picked at those; they aren't nits.

The Mac cost $2500 in 1984 dollars, not $10,000.

I think his point is that $2500 in 1984 money is >$10,000 today after accounting for inflation.

Their 'innovations' were things like a fucking talking paperclip which would try to distract you in word.

MS pushing Microsoft Bob and then the cartoon assistants in Office makes a lot more sense once you know that the future Melinda Gates was a marketing manager on Bob and later Office and thought that the assistant technology was an amazing step forward. Bill Gates came away from those meetings thinking he heard some amazing ideas. Eventually he realized what was up and started dating her.

Microsoft was on some weird stuff in the tail end of the 90's. They were publishing some killer PC games (Midtown Madness, MechWarrior 3), they launched their own version of the then-newly-commercially-viable optical mouse (the IntelliEye), they had the legendary Sidewinder Force Feedback joystick, and software like Bob was also paried with less-well-remembered oddities like Microsoft Chat.

I just checked because it was a childhood favorite, apparently hasbro published MechWarrior 3. I can never remember the big licensing crossover thing with fasa, hasbro, and grand wizards of the coast. Remember the latter had a battle tech cockpit sim arcade at their HQ back in the day (...I think?)

(Edit: oh, but fasa itself belonged to Microsoft Game Studios at the time, I never knew! But they didn't develop 3 either: that was zipper. Microsoft published two Mech Assault games and then seems to have totally abandoned the franchise)

Fascinatingly, FASA's ultimate goal with the Battletech/Mechwarrior franchise was to build the Battletech centers. It was an amazing experience to be able to sit in a Battletech pod for some good old fashioned lance vs. lance combat in 1991, incredibly advanced tech for its time.

Sorry, I think you misunderstood me. Here's what I said:

People take the wrong lesson from his life, which is generally viewed as "he did a bunch of evil shit to get rich but he gave it all away, so it's okay." Bill Gates folllowed that model.

So we are in agreement. Microsoft was (and continues to be) evil shit. I can see how I was unclear.

I probably should have expanded more on this. It's my belief that how you make your money matters even more than how you spend it. It's hard to give money away, and most non-profits are full of grifters. The typical titan does a bunch of evil shit, then dies, and then his wife gives all his money away. These wives, lacking their husband's business sense, are often very bad at philanthropy. Look, for example, at what Mackenzie Bezos has done with her billions.

A better model would be to run a company that keeps prices fair, makes good products, and doesn't look to extract maximum profits at every turn. Put earnings back into the business and find a successor who will do the same. Selling out in order to give to charity is probably a bad thing in general.

Ok, sorry for misunderstanding you, it seems we are in agreement.

Seems like having two quotation lines will result in them being stuffed in the same paragraph, so I fixed my comment to make it seem less like I am misquoting you.

Initiated nerds were shitting on MS in those days, sure, but I think that leads people to underrate how successful they were at putting computers into the hands of non-techies.

There's a similar effect with Apple, which is often lambasted for making kiddie walled-garden software for people who don't know how to use computers (as Wes Borg said even back in the iMac days it's a "computer for idio... for mommies and daddies") but it's undeniable how successful the iPhone design as "computers for the rest of us" has been, it's so successful that people have forgotten how to use computers that aren't smartphones.

But back to MS, the simple fact that they made Excel is a towering achievement of ergonomics. Excel is rarely called this but it's probably the most popular programming language ever made, one so simple and intuitive you can get 90s businessmen to understand it.

So yeah, as with everything if you scratch the surface it looks like the pile of shit everything is. But people underrate how valuable and impressive it is to stack shit that high. I think Zucc will be fine.

Excel is rarely called this but it's probably the most popular programming language ever made

In a very technical sense, you could indeed argue that Excel can be viewed as programming language. It seems to be Turing-complete: I can describe the rules defining state transitions in the first cell, use the rest of the row to store the state of the band and then tell it to fill out subsequent rows, running the TM row by row. It would be up to the user to stop adding more rows once it has reached a halting state, though. Of course, the memory overhead would scale with the number of total steps.

While I am sure that there are power users (or nerds who like a new challenge after brainfuck) who implement prime factorization, array sorting or iterative solvers in Excel, my estimate is that most users only create programs which take input which can be reasonably be considered one- or two-dimensional and runs for a time which is proportional to the input size. Like, they can calculate the sum, average or minimum of a column. Ask them for anything which is above linear runtime, like the median or matrix multiplication (without resorting to purpose-built functions), which even a novice programmer who has the concept of cascading for-loops can solve, and they will be stuck. (Of course, there is always VBA, but if VBA makes Excel a programming language, then it also makes Word a programming language.)

Despite this, spreadsheets have their uses (if you can stomach interleaving the code and the data). For example, I used one to catalogue my discoveries when playing Book of Hours without spoilers.

TL;DR: calling Excel "the most popular programming language ever made" is like saying that pictograms are "the most widely read script on the planet". Sure, only a 1.5 billion people can read the word "airplane", while likely more than half of the world population would recognize the ✈ symbol. However, these universal pictograms do not qualify as a script because they are not expressive enough. Seeing people use Excel for tasks which would clearly call for a programming language is like seeing a six-year-old who insists the he does not need to learn his letters because he can just chat with unicode symbols.

Edit: also, to the degree that spreadsheets empower users, letting Microsoft take credit for that seems a bit like giving Toyota the credit for providing mobility to millions of Americans. The empowering thing is the underlying invention, the fact that the customer selected Excel and Toyota instead of SuperCalc and Fiat is of much less concern.

Seeing people use Excel for tasks which would clearly call for a programming language is like seeing a six-year-old who insists the he does not need to learn his letters because he can just chat with unicode symbols.

Well, not necessarily. You're missing:

  • Distribution, guaranteed compatibility, and common UI/UX; all you need to run an Excel spreadsheet and the calculations contained therein is an Excel VM (usually, but not necessarily, made by Microsoft)
  • Zero overhead to pick up and use, everyone knows how to interact with a program made in Excel simply by pointing and clicking, which means lots of things you'd normally have to implement in more advanced languages are done for you (UI, saving/loading, the functions themselves)
  • Ease of observing, debugging, and tracing functions and program state (it's all out in the open, and the input-to-output function chains can be made as terse or as expansive as you want it to be)
  • Ease of printing data (to a screen or a physical page), which in other programming languages needs a bunch of iteration and string-conversion to work correctly

The best programming language is ultimately the one you know how to use right now, and "office worker gets bored, automates themselves" is [or once was] a valid career path. Sure, Excel stops being a viable option once you need to do things like talk to a network (which, totally coincidentally, Microsoft has an intermediate-level programming language called Access that can use Excel sheets as a frontend), and once you outgrow Access you're really in trouble (mainly because now you've created a problem for programmers to solve, and so now you're going to have to pay for the bootstrapping that Excel/Access did for you)... but most people don't get that far anyway.

like the median or matrix multiplication (without resorting to purpose-built functions)

Both of these are trivial to implement in Excel if you know what they are (without using the builtin functions, which seems... kind of dumb? like, do you implement lists from bare metal in python?) -- which granted most business users do not, but that doesn't make excel worse than a real language at these things.

If you think of it as a functional language in which you can see the value of every variable all the time, it becomes more language-esque -- you can do quite a lot without resorting to vba, you just do it in different ways than iterating over arrays or cascading for loops.

Excel can be very dangerous for business logic because it doesn’t have strict error handling. I’ve seen an insurance company severely misprice an obscure product because somebody accidentally deleted a cell in one row on a different sheet and nobody noticed.

Bugs can happen in python too, of course, but it’s at least a little more robust.

I said that it's an interesting programming language, not a good one -- believe me I have seen some shit too.

But to be fair, not that many programming languages to have strict data validity checking built in/mandatory out of the box -- you can implement that in Excel too, it's not even that hard -- just a little conditional formatting on key cells can go a long way, and if you really wanted to you could probably get pretty advanced.

But Excel users tend not to be that interested in this sort of thing, because most of them are also bad programmers.

to be fair, not that many programming languages to have strict data validity checking built in/mandatory out of the box

I'm sure you're right, and certainly python doesn't. Type hints aren't binding, etc etc.

If you'll forgive me for changing my tune partway in, what I meant to convey is that I don't like the way that excel splays the entire workspace out in front of you, allowing you to change the value of any variable at any time, anywhere through the history of the 'code' because it's not imperative in the same way that code is. That allows way more scope for weird, hard-to-find bugs. (Yes, you can lock cells but often people don't, or they lock the wrong ones, or they unlock something to edit it and forget to re-lock).

The only criticism I'm seeing here is that it's not the form of programming you're used to and that it's optimized for light scripting because that's what most people do. Those sorting tasks you're thinking about and manipulating arbitrarily sized data? That's part of the standard library. It even has lambdas now and the formula language is itself a PL in its own right.

It's fit for purpose as the lightest of scripting languages. You wouldn't argue Python isn't a PL because most people use it for light scripting.

Entire companies run on excel macros, and it has ports of Doom and XCOM in it. Go watch competitive excel competitions (yes that's a thing) and then try and argue it's not a PL.

I understand what you're doing. You're trying to argue that people who play candy crush aren't gamers. And sure, most people that use excel aren't programmers. It's still the most used PL on the world.

Only a very specific group of nerds was shitting on Microsoft (and still is to this day, in my experience). Most nerds, even most computer nerds, didn't really care about Microsoft. Plenty of computer nerds liked Microsoft. I don't think that @quiet_NaN's picture of Microsoft as this universally hated company is accurate. It certainly doesn't match my experience, at any rate.

Initiated nerds were shitting on MS in those days, sure, but I think that leads people to underrate how successful they were at putting computers into the hands of non-techies.

That's like saying "look how good the Mafia is at running Italian restaurants". Or like robbing a bank, donating some of the money to charity, and then trying to take credit for donating to charity.

The main reason why it was Microsoft specifically getting computers in people's hands is that Microsoft cornered the market, so nobody else could get a foothold. Microsoft should get no credit for pushing its competitors out of the market and then doing some of the good things that would have been done by the competitors that it pushed out.

Apple, Commodore, IBM, and RadioShack tried very hard to corner the market in the 1980s. It's their own fault that an upstart competitor was able to take it away from them, despite their first-mover advantage, because they did such a crappy job of actually taking care of their consumers.

This is overstated. Apple existed as a viable competitor during the entire period, and while Microsoft used what amounted to strong-arm commercial tactics to get its OS onto every PC sold, it was indeed this OS that enabled those sales. Microsoft should get credit for providing workable baseline software, that was very open to developers, and didn't cost much money. Did they push OS/2 out of the market? Maybe. It's also possible OS/2 wasn't a viable competitor to begin with. Sometimes companies dominate because they get first mover advantage and manage to build a large moat. Sometimes companies are dominant mostly just because they have an overall superior value proposition. Microsoft, for long periods, had both.

Recent iterations of windows are tolerable as an operating system for a gaming-only machine, though.

Modern versions of Windows don't crash like they used to, but you don't have to install BonziBuddy to get a machine full of ads any more; they bundle the ads with the OS now.

And you don't even get a purple ape buddy for your trouble.

You mean Micro$haft?

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