Re: The birth of BASIC

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#623670

From: Peter Flass
Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2018 21:57

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Rich Alderson <ne...@alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:
> 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].

Wow, thats a whole lotta overhead! All the cost of handling an interrupt
for *every instruction.*

-- 
Pete

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From: Peter Flass <peter...@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: The birth of BASIC
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 17:57:02 -0400
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