🚀 go-pugleaf

On Friday, June 1, 2018 at 4:22:50 PM UTC-4, Rich Alderson 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].
> 
> 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.

In my humble opinion, given Gates' passionate use of computers in
high school, I believe they would've simply gone into some other
programming project had BASIC not come along.  I believe even in
high school Gates was doing some commercial work (using his schools'
computers.)