Fifty Years of the Personal Computer Operating System | Hacker News Reader

Fifty Years of the Personal Computer Operating System

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53 pointsDavidLawsCHM8 comments

Dead at 52. That is food for thought. Some people achieve so much in such a short time. This can be due to living at the right time, but still, Gary was exceptional.

Riches have been chased in tech and they still are. You can't take it with you and Gary's curtailed life shows that.

And we still to this day don't know the exact circumstances of his death. Taken from us right as the WWW was starting up. Quite a loss.

The most detailed account I remember reading was that some biker gang threw shade at his Harley Davidson jacket at a bar, a fight ensued, and somebody hit him in the head. Don’t know how anyone was able to come up with this story, and no one got arrested though.

Occam's Razor got him, not the 'biker gang'.

He was known to enjoy his drink and to excess. It is an all too common pattern of human behaviour, and, aged 52, the chances are that he was self medicating for physical as well as mental pain.

Even if there was a mythical brawl with these fictional bikers that are always as tough as in the movies (not), then why was he in the bar in the first place? Oh yeah, they sell alcohol in bars and he had a taste for the stuff.

I am sure that all around told him to put the bottle down but the course of self destruction is a powerful one.

There was probably some childhood trauma that gave him the drive to conquer the world and the loss to Microsoft was trauma too. Nobody could have understood him as well as that bottle did. Sad. He is a great hero of mine and I liked his frequent appearances on Computer Chronicles because of how optimistically he talked of the future.

His coke bottle animation program was the first render system used by Pixar.

Was it already being used when they were just a division of Lucasfilm?

I don't know how they counted 50 years. The last OS for personal computers was WinME. Win2000 that came after it is from the server/mainframe line of WinNT, with multiple users, quotas, System account having higher privileges than Administrator, etc.

[dupe]

More discussion on the other CHM link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40113552

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