15 Big Cheats and Fakers Who Won

Manolith has a list of fifteen people the editorial team says cheated and faked their way into fame and fortune. Some of them have been in the news in the past few years, but others stretch back into history. Among their choices (to no small degree of disagreement in the comments) is Bill Gates, whom Monolith alleges:

The problem is, Bill Gates was never successful in his attempt to build an operating system back in 1980. He paid a man named Tim Paterson $50,000 for his shaky but working operating system, QDOS, which was a rough clone of an already established OS called CP/M, written by Gary Kildall. Gates polished QDOS into a finished product, renamed it DOS, slapped Microsoft on the disk labels and licensed it to IBM in what would become the start of a very lucrative career for an individual of very mediocre technical talent. The rest is blue-screened history.


http://www.manolith.com/2010/01/27/15-big-cheats-and-fakers-who-won/ via Digg | Photo: Corbis

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As for coconut's comment to upman...it was Neatorama that chose to use the "headline" Cheaters and Fakes. they could have changed it. And for fnord... Bill Gates has never promoted himself as a programming "genius". If YOU bought into that, it was your mistake. He is first and foremost a business person. He/Microsoft developed a product that people want to buy. So what's wrong with that ?

Jack
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My only problem with Gates being on the list is that Jobs is not. Sure Gates made a great deal in getting the core of what was later MS-DOS but to suggest that he had no talent is extremely wrong. Jobs has taken credit for many things in which he (ask Waz) nor Apple created on their own (first gui os - taken from Xerox).

Sure it's easy to bash Gates and MS but lists like this need to share the bashing.
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