50 Years of Microsoft

Voice of the DBA

I get the Gates Notes email periodically and I always find it interesting to read. Like Bill Gates or not, he is a very smart individual and has thoughtful things to say. Even when I don't always agree with him, I enjoy hearing his view and have enjoyed seeing him deliver presentations. In fact, one of my career highlights was at SQL Saturday #175 - Fargo, held at the MS campus. Bill Gates was speaking to employees that day and we were allowed to watch the Q&A from the balcony. Later, I saw him start to leave and stop by a sign. He asked someone about SQL Saturday. When they explained the idea for free conferences, he said "that's cool."

One of the recent emails talked about the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, with the original source code available for a BASIC interpreter. It's an interesting read to me, since I learned BASIC first (and a little assembler) on an Apple II and a TRS-80. I didn't start a company, but I certainly appreciate the excitement of tackling a programming challenge back then when memory and disk were in short supply. Most of my early programming tasks had me worried about how much memory and disk I was using, trying desperately to minimize both.

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