The winners of the Príncipe de Asturias award
(This is a reprint of the original post)
As I write these words, Bill Gates is only a few kilometers from my home, delivering a delayed acceptance speech for his Príncipe de Asturias award. For the moment, I will keep my opinion about these awards -in general- and this particular winner to myself.
However, it's sad how the regional media always adulates the winners, as soon as their name is announced. I observed this behaviour on previous years, and this year wasn't an exception. Unfortunately, sometimes they make mistakes. Today, one of the most important newspapers republished a paragraph with some of them. Obviously, they haven't checked their sources, and therefore, they say that Microsoft developed MS-DOS in 1979 (Wikipedia: Tim Patterson wrote QDOS in 1980, Microsoft bought it in late 1980) and Paul Allen owns Apple (Wikipedia: no relationship between Apple and Allen; in fact, Allen has a large share of Microsoft).