Author: Pete Galati
Date: 11:37:28 08/21/01
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On August 21, 2001 at 11:45:05, Roy Eassa wrote: >On August 21, 2001 at 11:40:29, Christopher R. Dorr wrote: > >>Just looked it up in my copy of 'Best of Byte Magazine'. According to Gates >>himself, it stands for 'Gee Whiz Basic' (Best of Byte, p. 197). I read in usenet >>that it was later 'solemnized' as 'Graphics Workstation Basic' (The poster cited >>an old IBM Manual) similar to the way that 'ping' was legitimized as 'Packet >>INternet Groper' to make it sound more acceptable to the corporate types. >> > >Officially, it was indeed Gee Whiz. But people at Microsoft "knew" that it was >also Gates William. Like a pun, it had TWO meanings -- the official one and the >one that was the real motivation for the name. In the end, it's basically just a name. I even heard a whole story from somebody about the explaination of why it was Gee Whiz Basic, and for all I know it was some goofy tall tail created by Gates & Company. It's too long ago so I couldn't repeat the story, but it was something to the effect that Gates or someone else was explaining something about basic to someone, and his comment after the demonstration was "Gee Whiz", so they called it that. Heck, that's not even a good tall tail. But I'd sort of be interested in hearing other explanations of GWbasic, just to see how many there are floating around. Pete
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