Bill Gates Celebrates Microsoft's 50th By Releasing Altair BASIC Source Code (thurrott.com) 84
To mark Microsoft's 50th anniversary, Bill Gates has released the original Altair BASIC source code he co-wrote with Paul Allen, calling it the "coolest code" he's ever written and a symbol of the company's humble beginnings. Thurrott reports: "Before there was Office or Windows 95 or Xbox or AI, there was Altair BASIC," Bill Gates writes on his Gates Notes website. "In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new ways to make life easier and work more productive. Making it 50 years is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn't have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella, along with the many people who have worked at Microsoft over the years."
Today, Gates says that the 50th anniversary of Microsoft is "bittersweet," and that it feels like yesterday when he and Allen "hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard's computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company." That code, he says, remains "the coolest code I've ever written to this day ... I still get a kick out of seeing it, even all these years later."
Today, Gates says that the 50th anniversary of Microsoft is "bittersweet," and that it feels like yesterday when he and Allen "hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard's computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company." That code, he says, remains "the coolest code I've ever written to this day ... I still get a kick out of seeing it, even all these years later."
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He hasn't changed, he just directs his efforts towards what he believes is for the public good
Re:Everyone should read (Score:4, Interesting)
It's interesting, because Jobs was notoriously a hard-ass on his own company, but I guess he was not afraid of competition from others. On the other hand, Gates wanted to crush everything else.
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But that's about the same reaction Jobs had to Android. He saw it as a shameless imitation of the iPhone and wanted to crush it.
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As I recall, Gates said that "Be shall be crushed". Jobs was taken aback, and asked rhetorically "why would you say something like that?"
... fast forward to Apple deciding to use NeXTStep (and ruin it) instead of BeOS because they would get Jobs in the bargain, and he then killed himself by juice fasting in response to a highly treatable cancer. Apple crushed BeOS!
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... fast forward to Apple deciding to use NeXTStep (and ruin it) instead of BeOS because they would get Jobs in the bargain, and he then killed himself by juice fasting in response to a highly treatable cancer. Apple crushed BeOS!
It's always amazing to me how people will just make stuff up to slander their imagined enemies.
Jobs was diagnosed in 2003. He had surgery within a year and he lived for 9 more years.
That's pretty much in line with survival rates for pancreatic cancers, including kinds that you describe as "highly treatable." Could a few months have made a difference? That's impossible to say, but his stats are not out of the ordinary.
Having had friends and family members go through cancer treatments—and be willing to
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Jobs was diagnosed in 2003. He had surgery within a year and he lived for 9 more years.
You're leaving out how the cancer recurred, and was still highly treatable with conventional treatment, and he opted for juice fasting... because leaving that out is critical to making your argument not spectacularly fucking stupid.
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You are factually incorrect. Whether deliberately or out of ignorance, I don't know. But hey, you get to insult Jobs and Apple on a forum, so enjoy that.
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If he wrote it in Harvard Lab (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not usually. Universities in the '70's were not like modern corporations and didn't require copyright assignments. I don't know if they do now or not.
those are limited (Score:2, Insightful)
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they didn't build it in a dorm room, they built it in the computer lab. and yes, the question of compensation for computer time did come up... and Bill pretty much got away with it because there where no explicit written rules about it until then.
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In a fucked up country like the US perhaps.
In the real world: what a person does is his own property.
How fuckt up is your country? You have to pay tuitions for a course that is free in sane countries? And on top of that you lose all rights on the work you do during your studies .... ? Seriously?
Ha Ha Ha Ha ....
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How fuckt up is your country? You have to pay tuitions for a course that is free in sane countries? And on top of that you lose all rights on the work you do during your studies .... ? Seriously?
Pretty neat that you choose to spend so much of your spare time hanging out on a US-based forum and interacting with mostly US-based posters.
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Sure, but just so you're aware, Gates was there over 50 years ago.
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Sure, but just so you're aware, Gates was there over 50 years ago.
Just so you are aware, Zuckerberg was NOT there 50 years ago when he created Fuckbook.
Isn't this the code he stole? (Score:2, Interesting)
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They dumpster dived PDP-10 assembly code that was likely used educate them how to build an 8080 emulator to write BASIC for the 8080.
Then he and his Lakeside pals are brought on to work on a payroll program in COBOL.
Like I said, the rich idiots used COBOL.
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"..The rich idiots used COBOL"?
Thereby showing how young you are. In the 1970s, "computer" meant "big room of equipment", used by large organizations. Except for a few thousand people, NO ONE had a desktup. And back then, the big ones were Fortran and COBOL. Sure, there were other languages - when I started working as a programmer in 1980, I dealt with PL/1. But you comment Kids these days.
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because when you're a billionaire you can do stuff like that
You've already met you self fixed quota of 20+ daily posts today, repeating yourself in loops about billionaires, gerrymandering maps, voter suppression, psychopath CEO, anit-trust laws etc. In short your usual autistic obsessions.
Don't you think it's time to call it a day and give us a break until at least tomorrow?
It's a pain to just see the title of your posts since you are a Chinese troll manipulating an American site moderation system and you can't even use Google translate properly. Example of a title
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Couldn't Harvard lay claim to Microsoft Ownership? Might make up for the loss of those government contracts.
Pretty sure if that legal percent held, then Harvard would look to claim ownership of both Microsoft and Facebook.
For those that assume that would open a portal directly to Hell, you are correct.
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The statute of limitations would have expired *decades* ago.
Only dumb idiots ran BASIC on the 8080 (Score:2)
I programmed in ASM on my DIY 8080 machine. BASIC rots the brain.
https://farm4.static.flickr.co... [flickr.com]
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50 years on, turns out that was done by filthy rich dumb idiots.
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The filthy rich idiots ran COBOL.
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I wrote some COBOL a long time ago. It was all 4G and stuff. Still not rich.
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You obviously were much too nice and didn't charge ridiculous fees for common business practice functions.
That's on you. Just a second, the butler is bringing me my smoking jacket.
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I can't tell you all of the ways that form letters improved my life...because I can't think of any.
There was a minute in time where I may have written the code that printed your personal coupon for a free scoop of ice cream on your birthday, if you signed up for that with a certain brand.
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"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
- Edsger Dijkstra
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He wasn't exactly complementary about BASIC either:
I suspect most Slashdotters, myself included, learned BASIC growing up, so that would explain a hell of a lot.
make life easier (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new ways to make life easier and work more productive."
Hmm. How is life easier or more productive by trying to force people to buy new computers that work perfectly fine? Or force users to create a "cloud" login they don't want? Or forcing AI stuff and ads everywhere?
Re:make life easier (Score:4, Insightful)
They didn't say whose life. Clearly, they meant their own. And life is easier and more productive when the sheep are forced to give you more money more often.
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>"You want to buy a new computer that doesn't work?" :) Yeah, that should read "to replace one that works perfectly fine"
BASIC on the PC was very capable (Score:5, Insightful)
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Capable for hobbies but serious programmers were using ASM and serious business ran COBOL.
https://altairclone.com/downlo... [altairclone.com]
The Altair was slow, the MS BASIC implementation was slow, the BASIC algorithms were slow. If you wanted anything close to real time response to external hardware, it needed to coded in ASM and them maybe called in BASIC.
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I remember learning Turbo Pascal in college in 1994 as a freshman!
The source code is in a PDF (Score:1)
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I'm wondering if even now, 50 years later, he's still worrying about people "stealing" it.
Anyone want to OCR this? (Score:3)
Re:Anyone want to OCR this? (Score:4, Informative)
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Ask your friendly AI to OCR it for you.
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Re:Anyone want to OCR this? (Score:5, Informative)
sudo apt install ocrmypdf
Printout of hardcore opcode. Nice. (Score:2)
Back in the day, if you didn't want to waste space with or learn assembler you'd write in Opcode, like a real man. I did too. Not this newfangled Assembler stuff the kids use these days. :-)
Current improvements are questionable (Score:2)
Bill dreamed of owning the software on them. He learnt from Apple Basic, protect brand awareness. It's why Microsoft's OS was called "MS-DOS" on every Intel-based computer. It also allowed a consistent command-set on them, making DOS-literacy portable.
... of 'stealing' APIs of software they couldn't/wouldn't buy while blocking their competitors using DOS/Windows API calls. Or, applying Embrace/Extend (MS only)/Extinguish (and replace) to APIs that no-one owned.
Remember, that MS bought most of the techno
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..."making DOS-literacy portable."
I believe it was when MS-DOS 5.0 came out and my dad purchased a copy at the beginning of the summer at Fry's in Sunnyvale. I read the instruction manual for the commands cover to cover. I used to commute with him during the summer to the Silicon Bay Area and would use his laptop to try out all of the commands and learn all of the flags. Bored teenager about to enter high school, but learning "archaic" commands like this has served me well.
When other kids were taking typin
I've written code for almost 50 too (Score:2)
Re:I've written code for almost 50 too (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.siemens-healthinee... [siemens-healthineers.com]
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We wrote the first versions of them.
That was cool.
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He didn't say it was good. He said it was cool. It reminds him of being a giddy youngster full of ambition and dreams.
It's ok to find joy in things, you know.
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I believe it's more that Bill spent a lot of time thinking about every byte because of the resource constraints on their interpreter. It wasn't meant to be maintenance-friendly, which is how we usually judge code, but space-friendly. It's kind of like slow-motion Tetris.
He was young and had time to ponder and re-adjust every last byte. When the business started growing, he couldn't micromanage bytes that way anymore, so it was the last code he ever got to put so much blood, sweat, and tears into every corne
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I'm not saying he regrets his choices, only that it was a unique time and project that he has nostalgia for. For example, if you built your own dinner table you may both admire your work and have fond memories of doing it. But that doesn't necessarily mean you want to become a professional carpenter. One can have nostalgia for one-off projects they've spent a lot of time on.
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And I'd never say the crap I wrote back in school was good code. If after 50 years he doesn't think he has written cooler code, he wasn't much of a coder.
"Cool" has a lot of dimensions with respect to code. It can mean "clever", which most experienced programmers learn to use as an epithet, not a compliment. It can mean "impactful" (in the sense of its effect on the world), in which case the coolness of code is largely orthogonal to its quality or other internal characteristics, since impact is mostly about time and place. It can also mean "provokes good feelings", which is more about the context of the author's life journey. I'm sure you can come up wit
Publicity stunt (Score:2)
It's a publicity stunt to pump up the book sales of his new Source Code book.
PCs (Score:2)
Well, except the truth is that Jobs and Wozniak built Apple around people being able to have their own reasonably priced computer in their homes, and Gates built Microsoft around IBM's dream of having a computer in every BUSINESS. At a very high cost. Business does not equal home. But I guess 50 years of putting competition out of business through illegal monopolistic tactics does not look so favorably in the Gates bios.
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Steve Jobs locked users into an ecosystem of proprietary Apple products and protocols. And he was a dead beat dad, had personal hygiene issues, stiffed employees (including Woz) and was an asshole to his subordinates. So he's not best role model. The best that can be said of Jobs and Gates is they both liked money a lot and weren't above being terrible people to attain lots of it. I suppose in retirement at least Gates is doing something with his money which is charitable in nature and clearly a serious end
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We've already had it, more or less (Score:2)
For quite some time now, various source versions had already been available by leaks. An 8080 Altair version (4K?), an early generic 6502 8K version, a CP/M 5.x version, and an 8086 version. And the labels from the 6502 version apply very well to a disassembly of early 6800 8K versions for Altair 680 and SWTPC, though the 5-byte float support needs to be reconstructed.
Admittedly they were all a bit lacking in that they only hint at the original PDP-10 macro-fied version, which this release seems to be. And
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I never heard about an Apple Mac-Os, "Apple" or "Microsoft" Basic version for 68k
Where did you find that?
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This all has meaning to me because I started on a TRS-80, and I was always disassembling its BASIC, followed by looks inside 6809 and 68000 versions. It's been fun trying to trace the ancestry of all the various bits of it. I sometimes say that I learned assembly language from Bill Gates because I learned so much from the code for BASIC. And I've actually been using this knowledge lately with a project to build a computer around a 68HC11 CPU. It's very convenient to be able to re-assemble it as necessary.
That sounds very fun! Are you documenting your project anywhere?
Didn't M$ already release M$ BASIC ? (Score:1)
I thought M$ already released M$ BASIC ... but was that only 6502?
Good (Score:2)
Now we need to look for the security holes.
Innovation? (Score:1)
Can we please stop with this talk about "innovation"? Innovation is easy. What is hard is producing solid code that doesn't fail every time you breathe on it. M$ has been using "innovation" as a smoke-screen hide the fact that their code base is utter crap, and they can't be bothered to fix it. This has been their style since day one.
Bill Gates should burn in hell.
Basic09 was the basic you would have wanted (Score:2)
Let's see if I got this right... (Score:2)
"... he and Allen "hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard's computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company." A resource neither of them owned... (in today's world that work product would belong to Harvard). And then bitched when people shared it?
Yes, he does do some good now. But he is and was a nasty man
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