Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has shared the 1975 source code for Altair BASIC. The code was the foundation on which Microsoft was built. Before Windows and before Office, there was a carefully crafted BASIC interpreter designed to fit within the limited resources available on the Altair 8800. Why an interpreter? Compiling …
30 years ago as an undergraduate, I remember a Comp Sci professor telling the class that he had a copy of Bill Gates' original BASIC and that it was a really fast, efficient and well-written piece of code. He said Bill is clearly very good at programming.
Then he laughed and said "But I've found a bug in it!"
He didn't elaborate any further. I guess it wasn't a very serious bug.
From Programmers at Work, Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA [1986]:
Interviewer: "Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?"
Gates: "No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."
'Nuff said.
If memory serves, he and Allen also used the infrastructure of said Computer Science Centre to write the Altair BASIC code in the first place. Strict interpretation of the rules of use would have made the software the intellectual property of the University, and not Microsoft.
Kids, huh?
Not just kids - grown-ups, too. Tim Paterson of Seattle Computing Products pretty much "created" Q-DOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) by taking CP/M, filing off the serial numbers and giving it a new paint job, then renaming it to 86-DOS and making it commercially available. Gates bought it, put a Microsoft sticker on the box and sold it as MS-DOS. The similarities between CP/M and MS-DOS 1.0 are painfully obvious.
However, Digital Research (who had created, and owned, CP/M in the first place) never gave permission for their IP to be used in that manner by any third party, which essentially means MS-DOS was released as a stolen product. IBM knew this. They went ahead with it anyway. DR was too small to be considered a threat to Big Blue. When DR threatened with legal action IBM agreed to offer CP/M as an option for the IBM PC next to PC-DOS (the IBM-branded MS-DOS) but ensured that the pricing was such that CP/M was immediately pushed out of the market.
Kids, my rear panel RS-232 port! Gates and Allen stole computer time at Lakeside to develop their own work that they then commercialized, then willingly and deliberately bought and sold stolen property. The rest of Microsoft's history simply continues that trend.
Recent study says 60% of modern Open Source code.copied from other programs... e.h. copy-paste via Stack Overflow.
Worked with chatGPT as a coding assistant?
If the kind of strict interpretation of IP.law were in fashion, the software industry would grind to a sudden halt.
Looks like pretty good code to me. I have familiarity with 8080 code from decades ago, and that helps. Figuring out the meaning of stuff in the assembler, and twisting my brain to octal (been a hex guy for decades) takes some effort. Lots of comments in the code, which is good - way too many "programmers" nowadays either don't comment, or have terrible comments. I haven't spent more than a few minutes, but it looks like the whole thing uses lots of lookups in tables. Uses CPU status flags as character classification - nice!
... is that one way to succeed in business is to lie. "Yes, we've got a BASIC interpreter that'll run on a 4K Altair 8080. No, it's not with me. It's ... in my other coat. Which is at the cleaners."
Mine's the one with the punched paper tape listing of the BASIC language "Star Trek" game in the pocket.
I have a friend who's a bit of a novice and wondered why his shiny development M1 laptop was thrashing hard. On closer inspection it turned out this fairly recent machine had 8gb ram in it. Explaining that I had double that on my GPU alone, on a rig that cost half the price, a lesson was learned about the cost of poor hardware choices.
Well, he sold the source code of a game called Bastar in BASIC for the SpectraVideo SV-318 micro computer to a US computer magazine for publication. Beyond that, probably not much from him around. It is even questionable if he even did any coding working himself at his first company, Zip2, which he founded with his brother Kimbal and a guy call Greg Kouri, who put up the first money and probably did most, if not all of the programming for their "online city guide"...
Say what you like about BG and Microsoft - but that's an incredible ballsy move - not only to promise you have a working application when you don't, but to sell someone an app for which you've not yet written on a platform you don't own and can't afford to buy. Solution? Step 1 - write an emulator for the platform.. Step 2 - write the app on the emulator.. Step 3 - delivery product in under 8 weeks. Talk about agile - some times it takes my work 8 weeks to do the paperwork needed to approve the paperwork needed to start work on any code.
I definitely remember attending interviews (1980?) for Comp Sci course at Queen Mary College, London. Reading the interviewer's form upside down on his desk, he had a checkbox marked "BASIC Damage" such was the bad reputation that BASIC had in academia. Seemed a bit harsh at the time, though I understand the point.
The PDP-10 (&11) were usually termed mini-computers not mainframes (limited address space). It still looked like a blue commercial freezer. I show my age by having actually programmed one. I know someone who hollowed out the gubbins of one and used it as a clothes cupboard (nerd award).
Its a long time ago (1972'ish?) but IIRC, the Intel 4004 was originally advertised as 'a microcomputer'.
(The image used in an Intel advert of the time was that of a few 16pin DIL packages (4004, along with 1, 2 & 3) standing up on end in a sermi-circle and intended to look like a 'normal' minicomputer's bays).
If thats all bollocks, just put it down to an old bloke's memory rot.
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Pre dot-matrix lineprinter fan-fold paper does bring back the memories. Modern development tools obfuscate the liniear nature of a programme and the (correct) order in which things need to be declared, although a screen full of code is probably as good as a page full of code in encouraging good segmentation of logic.
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