Who would you rank as more important in the history of computer development....

Gates

Probably Gates.

Microsoft and Windows made PC’s a household item. Then they tried the smartphone before Apple with their “pocket PC” Windows phones. Apple just came in and improved the idea

the guy at IBM who didn't realize he could deal with the inventor of DOS directly and cut Gates out

I found Pirates of Silicon Valley kind of weak. There is quite a bit of fiction added for dramatic purposes.

I would highly recommend the Robert X. Cringely documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" if you have not seen it. I saw it before Pirates which might account for the latter movie feeling underwhelming. "Nerds" is more rooted in fact since it doesn't need to tell the narrative in the same way Pirates did. There are a TON of interviews with the people at the beginning of all these major companies. Folks that aren't household names. I loved hearing from them as much as hearing from Steve and Bill.

Douglas Engelbart who in the early 1960s invented the computer mouse, hyperlinked text, and the first graphical user interface without which windows, and Mac GUI would not exist. Jobs and Gates were marketeers, almost everything attributed to them was already invented by someone else many years prior. Wozniak could be considered a true technical innovator for hs work in data storage.

Not sure, because neither one really invented anything. Gates was the shrewder businessman and Jobs was the better dreamer, but in the end I believe computers would have made it big without them. The coders that actually invented things are the ones that made it happen, we just don’t really know who those guys were.

Gary Kildall

quote:

---

would highly recommend the Robert X. Cringely documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" if you have not seen it. I saw it before Pirates which might account for the latter movie feeling underwhelming. "Nerds" is more rooted in fact since it doesn't need to tell the narrative in the same way Pirates did. There are a TON of interviews with the people at the beginning of all these major companies. Folks that aren't household names. I loved hearing from them as much as hearing from Steve and Bill.

---

Will check that out. Thanks for the recommendation

quote:

---

Jobs and Gates were marketeers, almost everything attributed to them was already invented by someone else many years prior.

---

This

quote:

---

quote:

---

Neither, Open-source software is a huge reason that we have the advancements of which many of us take advantage of today.

---

That's great but the vast majority of those who make open-source software innovations are doing so while standing on the shoulders of the two aforementioned men.

---

No man, you've got that backwards. Gates and Jobs stand on the shoulders of thousands of open source innovators.

OSX and iOS are based on BSD, which is open source.

Chrome, Safari, Opera, Edge, and numerous other browsers are all descended from the KHTML rendering engine, part of the KDE open source project.

Gates and Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter, which exploded in popularity because computer magazines published BASIC source code for people to type in and create programs for their computers. Gates spent the majority of his professional life battling open source software and just generally hating everything about it, but Microsoft may not have even gotten off the ground if not for hobbyists and magazines sharing code.