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To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (20131)	6/22/1998 8:55:00 AM
From: Harvey Allen	Respond to of 24154

Bill- Thanks for the link. For the record here is an excerpt: Bill Gates The key to our...the structure of our deal was that IBM had no control over...over our licensing to other people. In a lesson on the computer industry in mainframes was that er, over time, people built compatible machines or clones, whatever term you want to use, and so really, the primary upside on the deal we had with IBM, because they had a fixed fee er, we got about $80,000 - we got some other money for some special work we did er, but no royalty from them. And that's the DOS and Basic as well. And so we were hoping a lot of other people would come along and do compatible machines. We were expecting that that would happen because we knew Intel wanted to vend the chip to a lot more than just than just IBM and so it was great when people did start showing up and ehm having an interest in the licence.

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (20131)	6/22/1998 3:28:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

No, I saw the show when on PBS and it missed all the early part, when it was still a movement (computers for the people, computers for the small business person) and not yet an exploitation. History gets written by the winners, but thanks to the internet it's hard to erase the contributions of the early and relatively unknown completely. Lets really go back to origins for a second: A much better candidate for the 'vision' (god I hate that word now, after it's prostitution by a thousand PR departments) of the personal computer would be the handheld Dynabook idea, developed at Xerox PARC in the 60s, along with the IDE and the mouse. The dynabook ideal has still not been completely achieved. There were lots of other ideas back then too. Science fiction writers had clearly described the desktop, the AI computer, the suitcase computer, the Dynabook, the embedded computer, the 3D computer display, digital radio networking, and the Cyborg by 1960 in various stories. Often these stories were so poorly written that they were just essentially explanations of the technology or science idea and a sketch of some possible consequences. The 'Star Trek' tricorder idea was another kind of hand-held personal computer idea, which we still could not produce if we wanted to, though the cell phone is a pretty good implementation of the original Star Trek communicator - even looks the same. Lots of technology ideas get worked out in their scale and general premise in science fiction first. That catches the general imagination, including all those 10 year old science fiction nerds who go on to make hardware, software, cloning labs, and so on. In a lot of cases I am surprised that these writers didn't go ahead and apply for patents on some of their ideas. A lot more of them would be rich if they had. But science fiction writers get their ideas from somewhere, too. Sometimes they are mathematicians, engineers, or scientists themselves, like Heinlein, Clark, White and so forth. They talk to their friends about their most way out research ideas and hypothesis and then extrapolate. We all get ideas from someone else and then forget where we got them. Mostly I think that MSFT is part of the end-game for the PC. The productization part of the 3 act play, where the money gets made by those who jump in when the ideas are ripe and the stage is set. Innovators? Visionaries? Gimme a break before I gag. Curmudgeonly Yours, Chaz