CHERYL HATCH/AP Bill Gates in 2001

Monday, Dec. 7, 1998
If we are talking creativity and ideas, Bill Gates is an American unoriginal. He is Microsoft's chief and co-founder, he is the world's richest man, and his career delivers this message: It can be wiser to follow than to lead. Let the innovators hit the beaches and take the losses; if you hold back and follow, you can clean up in peace and quiet.

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Gates is the Bing Crosby of American technology, borrowing a tune here and a tune there and turning them all into great boffo hits — by dint of heroic feats of repackaging and sheer Herculean blandness. Granted he is (to put it delicately) an unusually hard-driving and successful businessman, but the Bill Gates of our imagination is absurdly overblown.

Yet we have also been unfair to him. Few living Americans have been so resented, envied and vilified, but in certain ways his career is distinguished by decency — and he hasn't got much credit for it. Technology confuses us, throws us off the scent. Where Gates is concerned, we have barked up a lot of wrong trees.

A 1968 photo shows Bill as a rapt young teenager, watching his friend Paul Allen type at a computer terminal. Allen became a co-founder of Microsoft. The child Gates has neat hair and an eager, pleasant smile; every last detail says "pat me on the head." He entered Harvard but dropped out to found Microsoft in 1975.

Microsoft's first product was a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8800, arguably the world's first personal computer. BASIC, invented by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1964, was someone else's idea. So was the Altair. Gates merely plugged one into the other, cream-cheesed the waiting bagel and came up with a giant hit.

By 1980, IBM had decided to build personal computers and needed a PC operating system. (Computers are born naked; they need operating systems to be presentable.) Mammoth, blue-chip IBM employed thousands of capable software builders, and didn't trust a single one of them; IBM hired Microsoft to build its operating system. Microsoft bought Q-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products and retailored it for the PC.

The PC was released in August 1981 and was followed into the market by huge flocks of honking, beeping clones. Microsoft's DOS was one of three official PC operating systems but quickly beat out the other two. DOS was clunky and primitive at a time when the well-dressed computer was wearing UNIX from Bell Labs or (if its tastes ran upscale) some variant of the revolutionary window-menu-mouse system that Xerox had pioneered in the 1970s. But despite (or maybe because of) its stodginess, DOS established itself as the school uniform of computing. It was homely, but everyone needed it. Once again, Gates had brokered a marriage between other people's ideas and come up with a hit. DOS was even bigger than Basic. Gates had it made.

Apple released the Macintosh in January 1984: a tony, sophisticated computer was now available to the masses. Henceforth DOS was not merely homely, it was obsolete. But it continued to rake in money, so what if the critics hated it? In May 1990, Microsoft finally perfected its own version of Apple windows and called it Microsoft Windows 3.0 — another huge hit. Now Gates really (I mean really) had it made.

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