Micro Memories

摘要

In the 1999 made-for-cable movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley," the film-makers chose to illustrate how significant a 1980 meeting between Bill Gates and IBM was by having John Di Maggio, the actor playing Steve Ballmer (Gates' longtime lieutenant), walk out of the scene, up to the camera, and tell the viewers that this — this! — was the most important moment in computer history. It was the moment when Bill Gates talked IBM into letting him keep control over his operating system and license it to others. "Besides, the money's in the hardware," one white- shirted IBM employee responds in blissful cluelessness to Gates' request. The repercussions would almost immediately begin to echo from it. Of course, Di Maggio (or, more precisely, the screenwriter) was right: this really was a key moment. It launched Gates and Paul Allen on the way to becoming gazillionnaires and it would eventually knock Apple off their throne as kings of the computer world. The building of the IBM PC had profound implications far beyond IBM, of course. It created a marketplace for computer clones, as anybody could build a PC with the same chip and operating system as IBM's and run the exact same software on it.