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  • Re: Altair BASIC Source Code

    From Gerard J.@21:1/5 to France on Thu Feb 16 12:40:37 2023
    On Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 4:43:11 AM UTC-4, Mr Emmanuel Roche, France wrote:
    Guy Macon <http://www.GuyMacon.com/> wrote:
    I have a question: what is the earliest written-by-Bill-Gates original-source-not-a-later-disassembly BASIC that *is* available?
    1) Guy Macon is a well-known spammer. Let's hope he will go back to
    Hell!
    2) Answer (for others): None. Bill Gates never wrote Altair BASIC.
    According to the listing (whose photocopy was published in a
    Microsoft Press Book), Paul Allen wrote all the BASIC interpreter
    while Bill Gates was a student at Harvard (Paul Allen was a
    professional programmer, him). After MITS swallowed the hook,
    they both went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Bill Gates
    wrote the I/O subroutines. A good third of the program was the
    Floating-Point math package, written by Monte Davidoff.
    Again, all this is written, black on white, on the listing.
    (You will also notice that, in MITS "Computer Connections"
    Bill Gates always talk about the I/O subroutines, never about
    the details of the BASIC interpreter. It is Paul Allen who explains
    what is or not available.)
    Yours Sincerely,
    Mr. Emmanuel Roche, France

    I just wanted to let everyone know that Mr. Emmanuel Roche is wrong. The book, on page 70, indeed shows the first page of the listing of Altair 4K BASIC. The credits are as follows (including the line numbers):

    00470 BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
    00480 PAUL ALLEN WROTE OTHER STUFF.
    00490 MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE.

    The book shows version 4.44. Version 1.1 also credits Gates as can be seen here:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#/media/File:Altair_Basic_Sign.jpg

    "00580 BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF."

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  • From dxforth@21:1/5 to Gerard J. on Fri Feb 17 12:16:36 2023
    On 17/02/2023 7:40 am, Gerard J. wrote:

    I just wanted to let everyone know that Mr. Emmanuel Roche is wrong. The book, on page 70, indeed shows the first page of the listing of Altair 4K BASIC. The credits are as follows (including the line numbers):

    Gates is famous for being the nerd who built a business empire and amassed
    a fortune. Being first to sell a working BASIC to Ed Roberts no doubt helped (allegedly Roberts was getting several calls a day from people claiming to
    have a BASIC 'nearly ready'). More interesting is what, if anything, was new about Gates' BASIC. If all the elements pre-existed, then perhaps not a lot.

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  • From Richard L. Hamilton@21:1/5 to dxforth on Sun Mar 26 11:50:17 2023
    In article <tsmkhl$3djcl$1@dont-email.me>,
    dxforth <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:
    On 17/02/2023 7:40 am, Gerard J. wrote:

    I just wanted to let everyone know that Mr. Emmanuel Roche is wrong. The book, on page 70, indeed shows the first page of the listing of Altair 4K BASIC. The credits are as follows (including the line numbers):

    Gates is famous for being the nerd who built a business empire and amassed
    a fortune. Being first to sell a working BASIC to Ed Roberts no doubt helped (allegedly Roberts was getting several calls a day from people claiming to have a BASIC 'nearly ready'). More interesting is what, if anything, was new about Gates' BASIC. If all the elements pre-existed, then perhaps not a lot.


    I don't know about the earliest Gates/Microsoft BASIC, but by the time
    of what came with my Osborne 1, it was an interpreter but tokenized,
    where each reserved word was a byte with the high order bit on, and
    some other things that internalized it enough to make interpretation
    faster. Some googling may find an MBASIC program that can (with
    minor adjustment for where in RAM the user program starts) list itself
    without using LIST, by PEEKing through RAM from that starting point,
    and printing a detokenized representation of itself.

    Contrast that with CBASIC descended from BASIC-E (the latter by one of
    the service academies, if memory serves) that had a separate BASIC to
    byte code compiler program vs byte code interpreter that actually ran
    it. Microsoft BASIC was definitely easier to use, although CBASIC may
    have had some desirable features or performance advantage, which would
    be way more than I remember.

    So if Microsoft BASIC was easier (didn't need separate editor and two
    more commands to compile and run), it might have had the advantage of
    more people being willing to use it.

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