🚀 go-pugleaf

hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com writes:

> On Thursday, May 31, 2018 at 5:11:01 PM UTC-4, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:

>>> Nice program.  I particularly like the way they briefly mention
>>> Bill Gates only to point out that they were there first.

>> The first to commercialize on BASIC. Without BASIC and the MITS 8800
>> there might not be a Microsoft company today. Would be interesting to
>> know if CP/M then would have lead the market well into the 1990s and
>> beyond with GEM becoming the GUI of choice and Gary if Kildall would
>> still be alive, not going to this bar and had this fight leading to his
>> death...

> I believe Gates and his friends were doing commercial work before
> they did the BASIC compiler.  So, I strongly suspect Gates still
> would have developed a major software company.

No, they weren't.  Read Paul's book.

Paul and Bill did have 1 attempt at a company prior to the advent of the Altair
8800:  Traf-o-Data was a side-of-the-road traffic counter (now commonplace, but
at the time unheard of) based on the 8008 processor.  Because they did not have
a development system for the 8008, Paul wrote a simulator for the processor in
Macro-10 (PDP-10 assembler) which represented 8008 instructions as the address
portion of LUUOs[1].

Paul and Bill always wanted to write a BASIC for a microprocessor, but could
not find one powerful enough until the 8080 came along.  Paul revised the 8008
simulator for the 8080, and that was what they used to produce the first BASIC.
Variants were used at Microsoft for the next 15 years to produce all the micro
versions of BASIC which they sold; Microsoft was a PDP-10 shop until PCs were
capable of self-hosting.

DISCLAIMER:  I worked[2] for Paul Allen, and was one of the team proofreading
his autobiography.  My name appears in the Acknowledgments to _Idea Man_.

[1] UUOs are instructions which trap as unimplemented in the PDP-10
    architecture.  The important ones are the Monitor UUOs (MUUOs), opcodes
    040-077, which provide the system call API for Tops-10 and derivatives and
    for ITS, and the Local UUOs, opcodes 001-037, which trap into the user
    program's address space, so that a handler can be written for them.  That's
    what the simulator did.

[2] I still work for the same museum, founded by Paul Allen, with which I've
    been associated for the last 15 years.  We've been spun off as a separate
    company instead of being a department of his holding company Vulcan, Inc.
    Since my paychecks no longer say "Vulcan, Inc." but "Living Computers", I
    no longer feel it appropriate to say "I work for Paul Allen".

-- 
Rich Alderson					  ne...@alderson.users.panix.com
      Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
	  omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
									--Galen