Bill Gates is a classic example of a truly stupid and worthless nozzle who cheated and failed upwards to become the richest and most useless man in the world. He was an uneducated, third-class programmer (he truly stank at it; I've seen some of his work!) who miserably cheated and merely bought the Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) from some infinitely more talented, intelligent, and harder working guy and then turned around and pretty much pretended to IBM to have developed the OS (which he hastily renamed DOS) himself. And the rest is asshole businessman history."

... have to start me thinking about one of my favorite avocations -- Billybashing. I too remember his programming. Those of us who have been around this field for a while have an advantage. We have actually been exposed to his programming when he contributed (meagerly and picayunely) to those myriad magazines of days long gone ("published" on plain 8 1/2 x 11 paper). Although I do take issue with you on one point. I didn't really think his programming made it all the way up to third-class. If it weren't for Paul Allen I doubt Billy would have made it much beyond mov dl,1 mov ah,2 int 21 int 20.

My impression of Billy was that he didn't really know what was happening in his own company. Years ago our local computer club sponsored Billy for a lecture back when Win95 was about to debut. At times he didn't know how to demonstrate a feature, and at others he didn't know that a "new" feature had already been incorporated into a previous version. When we officers of the club had the opportunity to meet him personally for coffee, I felt that he was full of himself. On a professional level I had countered his magazine contributions and viewpoints back in the early days when opinions at meant a little to him (very little though). I think most of the Homebrew Club detested his complaining that others altered and republished his code when his code was simply altered contributions by the others in the first place. He wanted people to pay for code he accepted from others who offered the source code freely.

He was however a first-class thief and cheat. He even managed to screw his own partner, Paul Allen, although he did later make it up to him. It was with supreme satisfaction when Stac Industries (Stacker) and Central Point Software (File Manager theirs, not the crap MS publishes now) successfully sued him. Somebody in Microsoft screwed up and didn't realize how deep the pockets were of those two companies. In these two instances his common retort to his outright theft of software ["if you don't like it, sue us"] backfired and he couldn't outspend the competition. And of course you forgot to mention that he sold his operating system to IBM before he stole it. [The very first instance of vaporware?] You also forgot to mention that he rewrote history though there are still a few of us old enough to have been around when he was nothing but the incompetent boy of a rich (very rich) daddy.