;WE COULD NOT FIT THE NUMBER INTO THE BUFFER DESPITE OUR VALIENT
;EFFORTS WE MUST POP ALL THE CHARACTERS BACK OFF THE STACK AND
;POP OFF THE BEGINNING BUFFER PRINT LOCATION AND INPUT A "%" SIGN THERE
;CONSTANTS FOR THE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR FOLLOW
;DO NOT CHANGE THESE WITHOUT CONSULTING KNUTH VOL 2
;CHAPTER 3 FIRST
They weren't integrated into programming-oriented editors, and it would have been unusual to run them against code.
The font-shimmering effect on scroll immediately reminded me of that, it is really distracting. And you can’t use reader mode to disable it.
(FWIW, I’m a fan of Bill Gates and all he’s done for the world)
And, btw, great infographics within the post.
So my money is that the code I wrote today is the joke of tomorrow - for all involved.
Also, I for one don’t want to go back to punch cards ;)
Writing a BASIC interpreter, with floating point, is much harder. Gates, Allen and other collaborators BASIC was pretty damned good.
[1] Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/bill-steve-jobs-remini...
What is hard is skipping the high level language step, and trying to do it in assembler in one step.
However, crafting an algorithm that uses IEEE arithmetic and avoids the limitations of IEEE is hard.
And Bill Gates complaining about pirating $150 Altair BASIC inspired the creation of Tiny BASIC, as well as the coining of "copyleft".
The computer came with some pretty good books with example BASIC programs to type in.
The floating point routines are Monte Davidoff's work. But yes, Gates and Allen writing Altair BASIC on the Harvard PDP-10 without ever actually seeing a real Altair, then having it work on the first try after laboriously entering it with toggle switches at MITS in Albuquerque, was a remarkable achievement.
https://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html
Then, their BASIC was debugged by running it on the emulator.
The genius was not the difficulty of doing that, it wasn't hard. The genius was the idea of writing an 8080 emulator. Wozniak, in comparison, wrote Apple code all by hand in assembler and then hand-assembled it to binary, a very tedious and error-prone method.
In the same time period, I worked at Aph, and we were developing code that ran on the 6800 and other microprocessors. We used full-fledged macro assemblers running on the PDP-11 to assemble the code into binary, and then download binary into an EPROM which was then inserted into the computer and run. Having a professional macro assembler and text editors on the -11 was an enormous productivity boost, with far fewer errors. (Dan O'Dowd wrote those assemblers.)
(I'm doing something similar with my efforts to write an AArch64 code generator. First I wrote a disassembler for it, testing it by generating AArch64 code via gcc, disassembling that with objdump and then comparing the results with my disassmbler. This helps enormously in verifying that the correct binary is being generated. Since there are thousands of instructions in the AArch64, this is a much scaled up version of the 8080.)
I don't see why it would be tricky. I don't know how Allen's 8080 emulator on the PDP-10 worked, but it seems straightforward to emulate 8080 I/O.
VS
Some college students selling software they didn't have and getting it ready from 0 to sellable in 2 months which led to a behemoth that still innovates to this day.
Google started similarly with PageRank as far as I remember.
Many undergrad examples as well in the web era, from Excite to Facebook to Snapchat.
(Note the unanticipated consequences aren't always good.)
https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...
Curiously this isn't the oldest extant version of the source code. The Harvard archives have a copy of version 1.1, printed on 30 April 75. http://altairbasic.org/other%20versions/ian.htm
I notice his interview on Democracy Now : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jPzzjbVuk
This guys mental map is impressive, as are the color of his book titles : https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16872611.Malcolm_Harri...
"Cosmetic offering to the financial markets to show that Silicon Valley still can control its labor costs... It's less the future flow of funds is improved ... than that they're signaling something to the markets ..."
Still, there’s something about Microsoft of that era. Bill Gates was “one of us,” a passionate nerd. This was an era where nerds like Jobs, Woz, and Gates ruled. The 1990s and the 2000s felt exciting, and it felt like technology was making the world a better place.
I must admit, even though I was firmly in the Jobs and Woz camp in the 2000s, I also fondly remember Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, and pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. Contrary to Steve Jobs’ opinion, I believe Microsoft has occasionally exhibited great taste :). For better or for worse, the 1990s was peak Microsoft.
Something happened in the 2010s. It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was.
Then again, I was a mere child in the 1990s, and I became an adult in the 2010s, and so I could be looking at the 1990s through childhood memories.
I do think the barrier to entry in tech has significantly increased. There was a wave of internet companies like Uber, (and their global equivalents) that benefited massively from providing local internet services. In the 2000s and 2010s the tech companies benefited massively from global poverty alleviation efforts to get users in remote regions on line. The push to get people online meant that millions of people in poor countries had access to social media and ads but not basic needs like toilets. As the tech companies saturated the emerging markets, covid began to hit. The stark inequalities began to be rubbed in. The big tech companies also dont really have any real material asset to fight over anymore. Their markets have been largely captured. As a big tech firm the game is now to maintain your lead. The industry is now run by MBAs, not hackers anymore.
I still remember how Microsoft, under Gates, acted like a robber baron to the whole tech community. You had a nice product? It was instantly copied by Microsoft, and they pulled the rug under you because they could.
You wanted open standards? It was a war purely because Microsoft wanted it to be. It was either Microsoft's way or the highway.
I consider pre-2008 and pre-iPhone launch to be the peak of the Internet, but it's all downhill from that year onwards.
The inflation factor is around 5X, so that's maybe $15k to $20k in modern money.
There were very few schools in the world with a five figure budget for computer experiments for a handful of pupils in the early 1970s.
Three letters: MBA
When the MBA's came into the tech industry everything got stale, 'safe' and unexciting as they want to leech their fucking hands over everything in the name of maximal profit.
Private Equity follows MBAs so you see more PE firms getting into tech during the same period. Same story, fucking leeches leeching makes the leeches happy at the expense of society. In fact, it seems PE firms and MBA grads love making the world an actively terrible place
I hate business bros. They ruin god damn everything.
Something that maybe one or two other dozen children had access to in the entire country during that time (60s/70s).
You have to also remember that computers were also seen as a public good for a large swath of users during this time too.
Makes you wonder how different this industry would be if we replaced Bill Gates singular childhood privilege with that of Bill Joy's (which looks like your typical middle class experience)? Only instead of one child, you could probably help thousands of children.
Something most professionals didn't even have.
My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. They took over the office productivity software market by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly. Their initial and core success - getting DOS on IBM PCs, which led to the Windows monopoly - was simply leaping at a business opportunity, I think even before they began developing the product.
Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? Do you mind that they tried to destroy and monopolize the open web (thank you Mozilla!)?
So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening.
But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things.
If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly.
Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way.
Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?
IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened.
Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.
Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable.
Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.
Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users.
The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.
For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.
Well the article is obviously a biased source, but surely developing a) an ALTAIR emulator for PDP-10s (Allen) and b) a pretty much full-fledged BASIC interpreter that was exclusively tested on top of said emulator (Gates) in two months, in the 70s was not the kind of stuff an average coder would have done.
I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays).
Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies them as pure breed hackers to me.
Back in the day (70s(?)80s) computers shipped with the programming language manual. All I got was a CDROM of ENCARTA and a slip to mail in for a restore set of MS DOS / WIN 3.1 diskettes(which was sorely needed I might add).
In the late 70s to early 80s you got a programming manual, but you had to save your programs on cassette tapes.
In the late 80s, you got glossy manuals which showed you how to turn on the computer, hook up a printer and load a program from DOS.
In the early 90s, the manuals were plain paper, smaller, and had instructions on how to use a mouse, and explained what a window is. Plus the mail-ins.
Mid-90s (CD-ROM "multimedia machines") you got a sheet of paper which told you to load the interactive tutorial from the included CD.
Late 90s you got 5000 hours of AOL. Plus another CD filled with co-branded crapware like CorelDraw Lite for Dell.
2000s+ crapware pre-installed, driver CD and a warranty card.
So really, the time period with the included programming manual was just a few years. And mostly all you did is print Hello World over and over again on the screen. So don't be too jealous.
Now we get: {{ Fill in the Description }}
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storageb...
Until the early nineties, the compilers and interpreters from companies like Borland and Microsoft came with big excellent programming manuals demonstrating how to use them.
Also any complex commercial application for MS-DOS, e.g. AutoCAD, Lotus 1-2-3, the BRIEF editor for programmers etc., would have voluminous manuals, including sections on how to write scripts in whatever embedded scripting language they were using.
Only for the users of pirated copies of MS-DOS, compilers etc., the access to manuals was more difficult and some of them may have even not been aware of what manuals were normally available for the legitimate owners. Most IBM PC clones also did not have much documentation delivered with them. Since they were made to be compatible with IBM, it was supposed that anyone who needs them will buy the original IBM manuals.
Since Windows 95, the vendors of hardware PC peripherals have stopped providing documentation for them, providing closed-source Windows device drivers instead, but before that, whenever I was buying some PC add-on card, it typically came with a manual providing enough information about control registers etc., that I was able to write an MS-DOS device driver myself, if necessary.
If I could buy that kind of reputation by tossing a few coins into the void, why not? Especially after I've stolen billions from others.
1. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
To paraphrase him a little bit:
Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network of dealerships with mechanics on staff.
Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are expensive.
Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from sophisticated space aged materials.
The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...
It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make it", "if it works you shipped too late" hustle culture that took hold of the industry, with entire products just being API wrappers. Really hope we see more companies that start out like Microsoft again.
The PDP-10 probably worked at "human speed" too...
How was it then entered into the Altair? Did someone have to retype it? Or was there media that predated floppies that was used?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#Origin_and_develo...
https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx
I expect it was distributed on tape as well.
I do truly wonder if the fact that he was publishing a PDF as downloadable "code" even caused him any pause lol.
I must admit that while it's computationally quite wasteful, the web page does look quite neat.
Git is for Linux and other cancers.
How do you think the likes of Delta and McDonalds manage their intranet and document storage? OneDrive is just a glorified SharePoint feature.
P.S. Joking only partially, and not much at all.
REAL windows enterprise companies worth their salt use a shared drive on \\global.
As for the heaviness of the page… My 8 year old iPad loaded it just fine, so it couldn’t have been all that heavy.
I tried to view on a Windows 10 machine that's connected to a physical keyboard. In the scrolling on the mouse feels so laggy - you gotta wait for the animation to play before you can read.
I spent hardly a minute to read the top and then jumped back here to make this comment, which I never ever did before.
Steve Jobs quote: "The problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste."
But I actually would prefer the pre-XP windows desktop to the flattened UIs of Apple's today.
(Anyone else remember 2004, how scared everyone was when the Windows 2000 source was leaked?)
See: Oracle v Google.
> Anyone else remember 2004
Remember John Ashcroft? The legal system was not as sophisticated then as it is now and juries were unlikely to penetrate even the basic issues of a case.
Maybe vomit. So many days lost trying to use Windows, Office and other "apps"[1] from Mictosoft.
[1] They were never able to write programs.
Oh, MSFT ain't even "terrible" compared to some other players. Try Salesforce. Or ADP. Or even Atlassian. I can't believe we're actually paying money to use them and OMG, the software... I feel like when going to conferences, I'd be like that guy from the cigarettes ad in Idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzUcoZdfCOY ... "You work there? Fuck you!" :)
Microsoft things I think are pretty OK and don't really mind using:
Xbox, especially Game Pass; Azure; BASIC (particularly classic Microsoft BASICs and SmallBASIC)
Microsoft things that I think are not completely terrible and sometimes kind of useful:
Hyper-V; WSL; VSCode; C# and .NET; Visual BASIC; Excel and PowerPoint
;-) I have never disliked MS games, or Xbox, or Game Pass.
I also dislike Teams, but Microsoft has integration, which means that it works with Outlook's calendar, with Office documents, etc. It's mediocre but full-featured.
I wonder what would have happened if Google Docs had evolved into a credible MS Office competitor? It's also amazing that Skype (and Hangouts/Meet for that matter) had such a head start over Zoom.
The reverse is also true: companies that are heavily invested in Google Workspace, GCP, and related tools are unlikely to switch to Office 365.
That said, there are exceptions. Legal professionals, for instance, often require the standard: Microsoft Word. And for advanced tasks, Google Sheets falls short of what Excel can do.
It's not fake, it's reality. And things have always has been this way.
How common do you think that story is? Over paying for software that doesn't actually make users more productive?
What strikes you as fake?
Both sources you link to say Allen and Gates pulled listings of the PDP-10 operating system out (probably DEC's TOPS-10?) of the trash. BASIC is not an operating system. So your claim is debunked by your own sources.
"...digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."
https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm
"...He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system..."
"During the home computer craze of the late-1970s and early-1980s, BASIC was ported to and supplied with many home computer designs. Slight variations to add support for machine-specific functions, especially graphics, led to a profusion of related designs like Commodore BASIC and Atari Microsoft BASIC."
https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-113-monte-davidoff...
Starts after about the first 15 minutes.
And DEC was in Massachusetts, Bill Gates went to high school in Washington. That would be one hell of a road trip to dig into DEC's trash.
No matter where you think the code came from, the impact of Microsoft BASIC was huge, and they were first to the market.
Microsoft basic wasn't the first basic interpreter which is a different claim than Microsoft basic source was copied from another interpreter.
"The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer."
This is how the industry innovates
Xerox did later sue Apple for IP infringement, however most of their claims were dismissed[1].
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
[1] https://arlingtonmnnews.com/articles/bits-and-bytes/xerox-ve...
> [0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
I searched the cite for the 'share', '10', '22', 'sold, 'sell', 'bought', 'buy', 'purchase', and found nothing. ?
Exactly how and when Xerox disposed of its shares is not public record, but it's known to be around that timeframe and certainly Xerox made a profit. The book _Dealers of Lightning_ goes into more detail about the deal if you're interested[1].
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/why-your-computer-has-a-mous...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Light...
Allen wrote a loader (in machine code) for it on an aircraft flying down to sell it to Altair.
What ever you might say about them, they were not dim.
In the 1990s, during the competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, compared Bill Gates to Ginger Rogers. This analogy suggested that, like Rogers, who danced everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels, Gates was adept at following and adapting competitors' innovations. This comparison was part of Sun's broader critique of Microsoft's business practices at the time.
"It has been noted that everything Astaire did, Rogers was able to do -- backwards and in high heels. That's high praise for the nimble Ms. Rogers. But for a would-be visionary, following someone else's lead -- no matter how skillfully -- simply doesn't cut it."
https://web.archive.org/web/19991013082222/www.sun.com/dot-c...
I remember one investment bank I worked for, starting:
IT tech: Would you like a Sun workstation?
Me: Nope, I would like a top of range Windows PC, with two or more screens.
IT tech: Yeah, OK, all the traders say that too. We're throwing those Suns in the dumpster.
They’re still out there. Maybe not visible to normal folks, but I know for a fact until very recently the Chicago Mercantile Exchange used their hardware in great quantities— maybe even as the underlying hardware for their matching engines, though I admit this is conjecture on my part. They don’t exactly let exchange customers in those rooms!
I miss their 10k & 15k chassis. Solid kit for their day.
What's left of Sun is basically a startup founded by a few ex-employees, some open-source software, and the rest of their IP being milked by Larry Ellison.
"r. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."
My understanding is that they saw the source implementation for other BASICs (on mainframes or whatever they were called at the time) but their code is mostly their own. Few if any programmers spring fully-formed from the head of zeus (although paul allen was close) and plenty of valuable intellectual property was originally created elsewhere.
See https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/
The industry pretty quickly moved to incorporate basic in rom on many platforms and microsoft was able to capitalize on that integration through licensing. I don't think his letter did much other than antagonize hobbyists - but they made a lot licensing to the hardware manufacturers later on (and the hardware was truly more valuable with basic on board.
(One of my all time to this day favorite computers from that era is the TRS-80 Model 100. I don't remember if Microsoft provided the entire software stack for it, but I believe it was the last product that Bill Gates actually contributed to the software development.)