Although sexist at times, this is a fantastic look into the start of the personal computer industry, and in subsequent documentaries the start of the software industry.
read moreGrace hopper. Prior to COBOL which she created, everyone programmed in binary. Then BASIC and FORTRAN after that. Intel was the first to make a microprocessor. They also started the laid back working style. First names, no offices just cubicles. Altair 8800 was the first personal computer. Previously intel was just taking the microprocessors and making traffic lights and calculators, but MITS (the company) made the first PC, the Altair. It was on the cover of popular mechanics magazine. They were a calculator company. About to go bankrupt. It was just a computer kit, you had to actually construct it. 1975. Still, had to load things in via binary basically Paul Allen and Bill Gats saw the magazine and claimed to MITS that they had created a BASIC interpreter for the machine, and Paul Allen flew out to show it. Paper tape. Home brew computer club was actually in Stanford. Everyone really shared. Good spirits, helped things to faster because they shared and when one person figured something out they’d share it to everyone. Woz basically was really shy. Came to the clubs with his computer. And people would start coming up to him. Jobs noticed. Said let’s start selling it. Apple I was just a board. Apple II was a fully inclusive computer, with its own display and power supply etc. Woz has designed Apple II, brilliant minaturization, but they needed VC money. A few hundred thousand to get started. Arthur rock. Invested. He was also one of the first investors in Intel. Mike markula was overseeing it. He was a former intel employee. Launched the Apple 2 at the west coast computer fair in 1978. VisiCalc. First spreadsheet. Harvard business school. Two founders. Apple II, which made sales go up like crazy. Came out in 1979. They didn’t patent it, didn’t become millionaires, but that’s what they cared about: making the world better, not making money. Ed Roberts was the leadguy at MITS. He really invented the PC. Jobs was worth $1 million when 23, $10 million 24 and $100 at age 25. Apple owned 50% of the market by 1979 with the Apple II. 1980 is when IBM decided they wanted to get into PCs. In order to do it quickly, they had to abandon something they had never abounded: IBM hardware, software etc. they did open architecture, meaning they bought components off the shelf and bundles them as a PC. Gary Kildal wrote the first OS. CP/M. This was what most PCs used as an OS. But IBM decided to try something new, from Bill gates. As many of these go, Kildale had a need for an OS himself, and some wrote it for himself and then started selling it. At the time, Gary did languages and Gates did languages (like how he did BASIC for the Altair). Bill gates didn’t shower or change his clothes when he was busy. IBM showed up at Microsoft about buying an OS from them. A kid came out to bring him to Gates’ office, they thought it was the office boy, but it was Bill. Bill said that he didn’t have rights for an OS and that’s not the business they’re in, so he sent them to killdal, PC/M, but PC/M turned them away; they didn’t want to sign non disclosure. Tim Patterson is the guy Microsoft bought the OS from in Seattle. He had written it based on a CP/M manual he read, so it was heavily adapted from CP/M. Q-DOS. Quick and dirty operating system. They bought it from the company he worked for, who owned the rights, $50,000. Then IBM came out with a PC. Basically saying "it's okay corporate America, you can buy PCs". MS DOS, Microsoft's OS, was the OS of the IBM PC. But here's the crazy thing: Microsoft got $80,000 fixed fee for that work. But the deal was that they could license their OS to others (they knew there would be others, because usually people make clones). The reason it was easy to clone: they used open architecture (which they had to do in order to launch within a year), meaning the processor was available off the shelf from Intel. The only thing IBM really owned was the BIOS. It took Compaq 15 senior engineers several months and cost $1 million to do the reverse engineering. The big thing was that they were completely compatible with any software written for the IBM. Their first year of sales were $111 million dollars (probably a record). "Microserfs" is what they would call Microsoft employees. And so a lot of young, I say people, but mostly it was young men, who just were out of school saw him as this incredible role model or leader, almost a guru I guess. And they could spend hours with him and he valued their contributions and there was just a wonderful camaraderie that seemed to exist between all these young men and Bill, and this strength that he has and his will and his desire to be the best and to be the winner - he is just like a cult leader, really. IBM planned to steal the OS system from Microsoft by creating "OS/2". Around 1989. Microsoft was helping them develop OS/2, but to make sure they didn't get squeezed out, they developed Windows, which had a GUI, which was a big step up. Eventually IBM said fuck it, and stopped working with Microsoft on OS/2 and Microsoft for the first time was on their own to promote their software to clone makers, which Gates was "very very scary". Here in the corridors of Microsoft it's a different style, it's personal. This company - in its drive, its hunger to succeed - is a reflection of one man, its founder, Bill Gates. Bill wanted to win. Incredible desire to win and to beat other people. At Microsoft we, the whole idea was that we would put people under, you know. Unfortunately that's happened a lot. Bill Gates is special. You wouldn't have had a Microsoft with take a random other person like Gary Kildall. On the other hand, Bill Gates was also lucky. But Bill Gates knows that, unlike a lot of other people in the industry, and he's paranoid. Every morning he gets up and he doesn't feel secure, he feels nervous about this. They're trying hard, they're not relaxing, and that's why they're so successful. Xerox. PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), 50 employees. Invented ethernet, GUI, mouse. They created it because they were afraid that if they didn't adapt to the computer world, nobody would need paper. Object oriented programming. The networking. Smalltalk language. They invented all this stuff, but nobody at the main body of the company was willing to accept the answers about the future of the office was going to be. Jobs just had really high standards. That's why he was obnoxious. Jobs had a very privileged invitation to go to PARC. Adele Goldberg is the one who gave him the demo. Within 10 minutes it was obvious that the GUI was how every computer was going to work one day. He demanded his programming team come and see it, and Adele told the executives at Parc that she refused to give the demo because they would be giving it all away, but they forced her to do it. Their first GUI Mac was the Lisa. Jobs was ousted though. Jobs met Gates at a conference and got them interested in developing software for the Mac. That's why IBM was winning, they had all the software. Gates was even on stage at Apple and got a deal to bundle applications on the Macintosh. Until the Mac, Microsoft wasn't in the applications business, it was dominated by Lotus. "I had a huge screaming match with Jobs about the software is written if we change it we've got to test it you know we're going to risk product quality, the manuals are already pasted up we've got to go to press if you do this it's going to slip the product. I don't care it sucks we can't do it this way. No design issue was too small and it was never too late to do it right." "Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas ehm and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world." Another Xerox PARC member, John Warnock, figured out how to get the exact thing displayed on a screen to print on paper. He created Adobe. Apple killed their project and cut a deal with adobe to use their software, and bought 19.9% of Adobe stock. This made Apple the leader in artists using computers. Microsoft was basically copying the look and feel of the Mac's GUI, and so Apple sued Microsoft. "If you talk to people that use the Macintosh they love it but you don't hear people loving products very often you know really but you could feel it in there, there was something really wonderful there." Lick, an MIT professor, really predicted the Internet. But had no idea how to build it. This was in the 60s. ARPANET started at the pentagon, which was kind of space race related research. Nodes were at universities across the country. They wanted to connect them all together, but the universities really resisted. They didn’t want to share their previous computing resources which were already overloaded, but they were forced to because they got funding from DARPA. BBN was company in Cambridge that actually built the connection between the ARPANET. ATT and IBM refused to build it because they didn’t think packet switching would work. Then more networks came online, but the issue was they all spoke different protocols. Needed some way of connecting all of them. Vint Serv and another guy came up with TCP/IP as the solution, and this was in the early 70s before all of the boom of personal computers. 1972 email was invented at BBN. That was really the killer application for the network, but they really weren’t expecting that to be so big. Amazon started as bookstore online. Traffic on the internet in the late 90s was doubling every 100 days. Rick boucher, Democrat from Virginia, in 1992 amended a law that finally allowed commerce on the internet. Before the browser, the Internet was really just lists of files in directories. Marc Andreeson at the university of Illinois started the first browser, Mosaic. Then he got funding and they founded Netscape and created the browser navigator. Fastest growing company. AOL, or America online, was there to try to get more Americans into the internet. And offered them a directory to navigate the internet. Java was great because they built JVM so it could run on any computer. This was big because before you had to worry about comparability. Eventually gates realized that they needed to do internet. The internet tidal wave memo. December 7, 1995. Microsoft announced they were going to do internet. They came out with internet explorer. Looked like Netscape navigator. Netscape was free to download and use but business had to pay $50 per year per person. Explorer was free. This is what the antitrust stuff was about. As a result, they had to give away navigator. In 1998, the US government stepped in. People are terrified of going against gates because he’s very difficult to beat. Networking was really created at PARC and they called the connection “the ether” which must be the origin of the term Ethernet. 3Com was started by someone from PARC who thought that Zerox wasn’t doing enough with Ethernet. They basically made Ethernet cards which PC manufacturers obviously ended up wanting. They shipped it in 1982. Sun microsystems really just made workstations, so basically terminals that would connect to a supercomputer in the basement over Ethernet and do stuff. Sun actually stands for Stanford University Network, where they got started Novell was kind of a networking company. Mostly software for the internet, like a file server. The well was an early place on the internet and people mostly used it to talk about the Grateful Dead. VC’s perspective, four risks: - [ ] People risk, one founder will inevitably leave. Need to vest their equity. - [ ] Market risk, is there even a market for this product. - [ ] Technical risk, can you actually build it. - [ ] Financial risk, which is whether you can actually finance the thing. Cisco really started because they wanted to talk to each other. So they linked all the networks at Stanford without being sanctioned by running wires through pipes illegally and such, and Stanford probably didn’t like it but they got a network out of it. They tried to convince Stanford to license the stuff to other schools but they wouldn’t do it. So they started Cisco systems on their own and made tons of money. Funded it on credit cards really. They did it. Turned down by 70 or 80 VCs. Worked on it out of their house. The founders of Cisco really felt like their VC, don valentine at sequoia, fucked them over. 4 year vesting, 30% in the company. They called it “ indentured servitude”. If they didn’t do what the company asked they could buy back the shares they apparently already owned. Nerds 2.0.1