Bill Gates Celebrates Microsoft's 50th By Releasing Altair BASIC Source Code (thurrott.com)
- Reference: 0176906809
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/02/2145238/bill-gates-celebrates-microsofts-50th-by-releasing-altair-basic-source-code
- Source link: https://www.thurrott.com/microsoft/319244/bill-gates-celebrates-microsofts-50th-by-releasing-altair-basic-source-code
> "Before there was Office or Windows 95 or Xbox or AI, there was Altair BASIC," Bill Gates writes on [2]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."
[1] https://www.thurrott.com/microsoft/319244/bill-gates-celebrates-microsofts-50th-by-releasing-altair-basic-source-code
[2] https://gatesnot.es/3FF4Sbv
If he wrote it in Harvard Lab (Score:3)
Couldn't Harvard lay claim to Microsoft Ownership? Might make up for the loss of those government contracts.
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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:1)
Basically if it's a grad student research project it's the university's (because you did it with university resources, as part of your "job") but if you build it in your dorm room like Bill did then it's yours.
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I think they do. Institutions like Stanford, MIT and Harvard make millions to billions from their patents and IP. For example, Stanford owns the patent on PageRank (Google Search) and MIT is licensing CRISPR gene editing technology.
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Sure, but just so you're aware, Gates was there over 50 years ago.
Isn't this the code he stole? (Score:2)
I know he dumpster dived a bunch of code for a basic interpreter that was Microsoft's first product. He admitted to it in a book but then he spent a bunch of money having every copy of that book destroyed because when you're a billionaire you can do stuff like that
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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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> 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
Only dumb idiots ran BASIC on the 8080 (Score:2)
I programmed in ASM on my DIY 8080 machine. BASIC rots the brain.
[1]https://farm4.static.flickr.co... [flickr.com]
[1] https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3341/4629408520_408884c3d5_o.jpg
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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.
make life easier (Score:3, 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?
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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:4, Insightful)
BASIC really didn't get surpassed until Borland release Turbo Pascal in 1983.
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Capable for hobbies but serious programmers were using ASM and serious business ran COBOL.
[1]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.
[1] https://altairclone.com/downloads/manuals/Microsoft%20COBOL-80.pdf
The source code is in a PDF (Score:1)
Is that a boomer thing?
Anyone want to OCR this? (Score:3)
I wasn't expecting 150-odd pages of images, you can't really do much with it in this form.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Also, there's a buffer overflow on page 18, an authentication bypass on page 37, RCE on page 41, a remotely exploitable DoS on page 50, a ...
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Ask your friendly AI to OCR it for you.
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I did, but all I got was an implementation of a multiply routine in INTERCAL.
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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)
> ... a computer on every desk ...
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.
> ... to innovate new ways ...
... 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.
> ... worked at Microsoft ...
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)
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.
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.
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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He hasn't changed, he just directs his efforts towards what he believes is for the public good
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I remember reading an interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together during the 90's. The interviewer asked them what they thought of BeOS. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS). As I recall, Gates said that "Be shall be crushed". Jobs was taken aback, and asked rhetorically "why would you say something like that?" If they continued that line of conversation, it was not included in the printed article.
It's interesting, because Jobs was notoriously a hard-ass on his own company, but I guess he was no
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There was a famous interview where Gates asked if MS would program for NEXTSTEP, and he said something like "program for it??? I'll piss on!"
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I wonder where Microsoft would have ended up if they did not do all their dirty tricks