Talk:Traf-O-Data

Untitled

Some article i came across that discuss Bill's before M$ [1]— Preceding unsigned comment added by Wk muriithi (talk • contribs) 17:48, 16 February 2005 (UTC)

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I have made some change but I don't have the time and the skill, good work.Mbios 17:08, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Needs re-write

[2] I don't know whether somebody copied the text from there, or whether the site copied from wikipedia. What should we do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gogodidi (talk • contribs) 15:04, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I would guess the Wikipedia contributor copied most of it from that site. I have access to other sources and can re-write the article. I should be able to do this in a week or two.

Wallace, James; Jim Erickson (1992). Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. John Wiley & Sons. pp. pg 44-46, 57–59. ISBN 0-471-56886-4. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

-- SWTPC6800 19:35, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Ownership

Several rather poor sources asy that the ownership of Traf-O-Data was:

• split 43% 21% 36% for Gates, Allen and Gilbert
• that this was signed in 1975 (two years *after* the Traf-O-Data work!)
• that the agreement expressly allowed Gates and Allen to use the emulator developed by Traf-O-Data for their new Altair project[3][4]

"They repaired and debugged the machine, but it never became a product—which was fortunate. Success would have distracted Gates and Allen at a crucial moment. As it was, by the time the lone Traf-O-Data began processing traffic tapes in 1975, the two had turned the operation over to Gilbert and moved on to form Microsoft."[5]

...may explain this. Snori (talk) 08:49, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

The source for the three bullet points is Manes & Andrews (1993). Gates, Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-42075-7, which is the source with the most detailed coverage of the topic I've seen. It's spread out over several sections of the book, so refer to the book's index.

Of course, the percentages were actually 43% Gates, 36% Allen and and 21% Gilbert.

The machine (hardware) never became a product, but the service continued on until the partnership suspended the service in 1979. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:10, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Allen, Paul (2011). Idea Man, Penguin, ISBN 978-1-59184-382-5 also has good coverage of this topic. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:24, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

I would avoid using the third edition of Fire in the Valley (2014) as a source for this topic. "It took Gates, Allen, and Gilbert almost a year to get the traffic-analysis machine running. When they finally did, in 1972 !? they started a company called Traf-O-Data..." The authors seem to have missed the fact that 1972 is the year the 8008 was released, so they couldn't have been working for a year on a machine that used a chip which had yet to be released. Allen didn't have a workable 8008 simulator until summer 1973, and they didn't pitch the product to city engineers until summer 1974. These aren't the only details these authors have flubbed. Maybe they can release a fourth edition of their book that finally fixes this? wbm1058 (talk) 17:26, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

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CP/M?

I've removed the following from the article:

This software used CP/M as an operating system.

This claim seems rather dubious to me - the timing is wrong (CP/M wasn't written until 1974, which is rather late for a company operating between 1972 and 1975 to have used it on their only development project, and to my understanding was not commercially available until 1976), the details don't match (as described in the article, Traf-O-Data's system was based on an 8008 processor, but CP/M didn't run on that architecture, but rather on the 8080), and the source is a self-published youtube video that repeats the story that IBM didn't buy CP/M because Kildall failed to turn up to a meeting, which is [probably not true](https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0707/6001336a.html). 176.35.207.239 (talk) 04:57, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

References