Promptly after switching I learned c and never looked back, but there's a lot to be said for what these early open-source (ykwim) games unlocked.
Hell, I started coding because I wanted to play games, and could only do so by copying them into a micro from a magazine (storage media was prohibited) - and fairly promptly wanted to cheat - and before I even really realised, was writing my own games and finding holes in the micro's interpreter that could cause entertaining crashes (I still fondly remember the look of panic on the geography (that was the nearest thing to computers, I guess?) teacher's face on coming into a lab (air raid shelter) full of vdus displaying a garbled mess).
So yeah, "bad" code can be great to learn from at an early level.
Comment complete, please proceed to downvote.
Who wrote more elegant software?
Who undercut the price of the other's software? And why?
Microsoft's early success was not due to originality.
Gates has no aesthetic. He has no respectable standard of quality.
Does anyone remember "Microsoft Bob"?
He may be worthy of respect by less capable programmers. He may be worthy of respect by the business community. He may be worthy of respect for his philanthropic efforts.
But for software users who have any insight into and appreciation of software quality, he has yet to earn any respect. For these users, he has only impeded progress. And Microsoft continues this tradition to this day.
It is perfectly OK to critique him on this particular point.
[Original title was something like "Gates wrote this beauty at four in the morning."]
"'We were just ahead of our time, like most of our mistakes,' Gates says of personal agents like the notorious Clippy character."
"Gates has a personal connection to Microsoft Bob -- more than it being just another product launched on his watch -- as his wife, Melinda French Gates, was a marketing manager on the Bob project."
If anything, this was likely a demo of Microsoft BASIC, let's not forget that Bill Gate's first product was not an OS, but rather a BASIC interpreter written in 1975 for the Altair 8800, written in assembly on paper tape, without the actual hardware! This was written a good 5-7 years later.
While some may not like Bill Gates, he was probably a better programmer than most of you in his youth and this was before the Internet where it's now easy to get access to books, screencasts and lots of sample code via github. Give the man his respect.