The link back to 'Can Bill Gates Write Code?" irked me anew.
The 'jump into the middle of an instruction' trick was well known at the time, and it almost certainly wasn't developed by Bill Gates. Using clever idioms you learned from others shows that you learned a little bit from others, but it doesn't necessarily mean you are a good coder.
My experience was reverse-engineering a 1978 or 1979 era Microsoft Basic-in-ROM to find and fix a garbage collection bug. There were plenty of questionable parts of the code, and the bug itself showed that no one had ever tested that part of the code. Any long-running program that used strings would eventually get corruption.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
