To be fair, even Microsoft doesn't use the binary size of their applications as a measure of their capabilities. Yes, they are ginormous, but they aren't advertising "Windows 8: The Binaries are Bigger, so It Must Be Better!"

Bill Gates has about as much to do with Windows 8 as William E. Boeing has to do with the 787.

Didn't he have some contribution to MS DOS?

He and Paul Allen wrote Altair BASIC, a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. I believe they just bought MSDOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

Other than writing the check?

In some circles, that's the most important contribution. ;)

Windows binaries (PE file format) stores more than just executable code. You can store any resource data you wish; from string tables to images and icons through to zip archives (hence how self-extracting archives work).

More on that:

http://ianmurdock.com/platforms/on-the-importance-of-backwar...

Original ASP.NET blog entry was gone, best I could find.

> There seems to be quite a lot of lines of code there.

Oh yeah, that's Moore's Law at work here too!