It's a pity that the then Micro-soft did not have copy protection technology - if they had, they might never have established such a strong foothold in the market, and the history of computing would have been quite different.
> ...in 1998 during a candid moment in front of an audience at the University of Washington acknowledged the problem with enforcing software copyrights in the developing world:
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
Microsoft moved to a business model where they received royalties paid directly from the OEMs. And I suppose, BASIC was a teaser for MS's more advanced developer tools.
My guess is that "Yeah, me too" posts rarely add anything to the conversation - sorry, I'm being blunt here, but that's the way HN rolls. If you find a post humorous, just upvote and move on. You'll get your chance to crack a joke in due time.
The contrast is with ten-comment-long Redditesque variants-on-a-theme threads, which I personally enjoy - on Reddit. Here, I'd rather cut to the chase with insightful commentary.
