🚀 go-pugleaf

Charles Richmond <nume...@aquaporin4.com> writes:

> On 6/1/2018 3:22 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:

>> 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].

> Now wait...  I read somewhere that Gates and Allen worked on weekends at 
> some Seattle company when the the two guys were still in high school or 
> junior high.  At this company the two got good looks at the PDP-10 
> source code for compilers and editors... including a Dec BASIC.  ISTM 
> that the two were paid something like $2 per hour.

You've either misremembered what you read, or your source was garbled.

In the summer of 1968, a young high school math teacher named Fred Wright (not
the same Fred Wright who was a grad student at SAIL!) attended a summer school
at Stanford for math teachers to teach them BASIC as a tool for teaching
programming to students.  He was so enthusiastic about it that on his return to
the Lakeside School in Seattle, he convinced the Lakeside Mothers Club that
computers were so important that they devoted the funds from the annual Bake
Sale to paying for an account on GEIS (the General Eletric Information System,
a nationwide timesharing system) for those students who might like to learn
programming.

Two of the students who signed up were a sophomore, Paul Allen, and an eighth
grader, Bill Gates.  They were two of the half dozen who really got into
computing (Harvey Motulsky, Robert McCaw, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans, to be
complete).  They ran through the annual budget in the first month.

At that time, Harvey's father saw a timesharing service bureau being
established in Seattle's University District, and the boys came into contact
with the Computer Center Corporation (AKA "C-Cubed") and the PDP-10.  They were
so obvioulsy enthusiastic that they were given free access to the system as
long as they kept records of what they were doing whenever the system crashed;
the systems programmers gave them access to the Macro-10 and UUO manuals, which
they devoured.

Five of the boys went on to work as programmers for RODS, part of the
Bonneville Dam project, over the summer between Paul's junior and senior years
in high school.  Their boss was later the business manager of the museum from
2011 to 2015.

> I read _Idea Man_, but I'm not sure where I read about the above.  _Idea 
> Man_ was written so much better that Walter Isaacson's biography of 
> Steve Jobs, which I also read.  (IMO)

It has all of this, with corroborative detail (like the names of the systems
programmers: Steve "Slug" Russell of MIT and Dick Gruen & Bill Weiher of SAIL).

-- 
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