Bill Gates didn’t invent anything: billionaire gets accused, called out

Bill Gates didn’t invent anything: billionaire gets accused, called out

These are words from Vandana Shiva who says Bill Gates didn’t invent anything, but pretty much took the idea and patented it before someone else could. That means Bill Gates is likely a scumbag if this is true. I did a Google search and looked for more, finding this interesting top-voted answer on Quora. It said the following:

“The computer” existed in several precursor devices dating back to the Greek Antikythera Mechanism that was in use around 100BCE. The Chinese Abacus is even older, if you want to count that. Bill Gates had nothing to do with inventing either of them, just as he had nothing to do with the Babbage Difference Engine, or other 19th Century computing machines.Gates had nothing to do with the invention of digital computers in the late 1930s (The US Navy’s TDC was an early example), or of the barn-sized mainframe computers that followed.Gates came on the national scene just about the time that personal computers (PCs) were developed: His first widely-used invention was the version of the BASIC programming language that was used in the Altair PC in the mid-1970s. Note that Gates did not invent the computer hardware, but instead he developed the “language” that was used to write the software.Gates’ next big splash was an actual operating system: MS-DOS (MicroSoft Disc Operating System) , designed to work with the new IBM PCs. MS-DOS was actually Gates’ revision of Tim Paterson’s QDOS, which itself was a revision of Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system. In other words the “inventor” credit really goes to Kildall. Because Gates had tons more entrepreneurial talent than either Kildall or Peterson, he snared the contract with IBM, and thus became the “face” of the IBM PC’s operating system.For the next few years Gates built Microsoft — his most notable invention — and after lots of hiring, firing, and (alleged) plagiarizing of code, Microsoft (all of it, not just Gates) produced the Windows operating system.Gates did not invent “the computer” or any hardware subsystem, but the software Microsoft produced over the next 3 decades drove many advances on the hardware side, including increases in hard-drive size, processor power, and graphics chip features.Some people say that, more than any other company, Microsoft helped the growth of the antivirus industry because the widespread adoption of Windows by home users gave the vandals who wrote viruses a big soft target, and Microsoft’s practice of crushing competitors left plenty of jobless, angry nerds in its wake.So, no, Bill Gates did not invent the computer, but he ran a company that fed it software to run. He did that because he was an entrepreneur, first and last.