was never investigated. But, its not hard for you to look into, to
discover that Gates made illegal hidden deals with OEMs restricting them
to only installing Microsoft software. The FCC did nothing.
His organization also stole software. The FCC did nothing.
Digital Research produced a DOS operating system that ran all the DOS
software and was more stable than Microsoft DOS. Microsoft pressured
other software houses to prevent them from cooperating with DR-DOS.
The FCC did nothing. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.
And you, my friend, are paying for it.
Programmers realized Microsoft was stealing software, so they put 'back
doors' into their code, that is undo***ented commands that let them know
when some of their software was stolen. The most infamous case of a
computer virus, which cost businesses like yours billions, was a
Michaelangelo that at first was thot to be distributed on hacker and BBS
networks. But then, it was discovered that the sabotage code was on the
disk, in the shrinkwrap, from a software house.
They stole a programmer's code, rightly thinking, like Bill Gates thot,
that they had enuf lawyers to keep the coder in court forever. Only, the
thing was, the programmer figured this out, so he inserted the virus in
his code, which he knew how to disable, in case it was stolen. Which it
was. Charges against the coder of the Michaelangelo virus were dropped.
And because of all the code Microsoft stole, which programmers knew they
would, it also stole the sabotage software. And every once in a while,
some hacker finds out about the stolen code and figures out how to
trigger it. Microsoft will never get a handle on this.
And you get to pay for the crimes of Bill Gates. Aint the "free market"
just great? So yes, Gates made all these billions. But what the market
has paid Microsoft for software is but a fraction of what it has cost
everyone in terms of the downtime and virus scanning software. Had Gates
been prosecuted at the outset, your desktop would be far more stable
today. But by the time the legal system figured out what had happened,
Gates had already made enuf money to buy enuf lawyers to keep the whole
thing in court forever. And unaware of the danger of revenge sabotage
software, they lacked the balls to take Gates on.
This a clue to why computer professionals have Linux on their own
desktops, and why servers run Linux.
If you look back in the archives of PC magazine, you can see how office
productivity rose with each new edition of software, from DOS 1 to DOS 2
and then DOS 3, DOS 3.3, and finally, DOS 3.31; and you can see how,
when windows 3 came out to replace DOS, the productivity curve suddenly
flatted out. Workers were wasting time picking wall paper.
DR-DOS 5 came out with a much more powerful batch program compiler so
that it was much easier to automate routine jobs. The memory management
was more stable, and with a simple hotkey you could pull up any if
several other desktops, what we now call multi-tasking, each of which
could be started up or shut down without affecting any of the others.
But it lacked the eye candy of Windows and besides, no OEM would be able
to install it and still offer other users a Microsoft OS. Which is, and
has been since the days of TR Roosevelt, an infringement of free trade.
Despite the elegance of Libertarian official policy, Libertarians have
lacked the moral integrity to challenge the infringement by massive
cor****ations like Microsoft of the free market they say they love. That
is why they themselves remain a niche market.
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