Bill Gates Began the Altair BASIC Code in His Head While Hiking as a Teenager (msn.com) 114
Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine).
Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven days or more." (His favorite breakfast dish was Oscar Mayer Smokie Links.) But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Both hiking and programming "felt like an adventure... exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults couldn't reach."
Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to define my own measure of success, and it seemed limitless, not determined by how fast I could run or how far I could throw. The logic, focus and stamina needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me. Unlike in hiking, among that group of friends, I was the leader.
When Gates' school got a (DEC) PDP-8 — which cost $8,500 — "For a challenge, I decided I would try to write a version of the Basic programming language for the new computer..." And Gates remembers a long hike where "I silently honed my code" for its formula evaluator: I slimmed it down more, like whittling little pieces off a stick to sharpen the point. What I made seemed efficient and pleasingly simple. It was by far the best code I had ever written...
By the time school started again in the fall, whoever had lent us the PDP-8 had reclaimed it. I never finished my Basic project. But the code I wrote on that hike, my formula evaluator — and its beauty — stayed with me. Three and a half years later, I was a sophomore in college not sure of my path in life when Paul Allen, one of my Lakeside friends, burst into my dorm room with news of a groundbreaking computer. I knew we could write a Basic language for it; we had a head start.
Gates typed his code from that hike, "and with that planted the seed of what would become one of the world's largest companies and the beginning of a new industry."
Gates cites Richard Feynman's description of the excitement and pleasure of "finding the thing out" — the reward for "all of the disciplined thinking and hard work." And he remembers his teenaged years as "intensely driven by the love of what I was learning, accruing expertise just when it was needed: at the dawn of the personal computer."
Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven days or more." (His favorite breakfast dish was Oscar Mayer Smokie Links.) But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Both hiking and programming "felt like an adventure... exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults couldn't reach."
Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to define my own measure of success, and it seemed limitless, not determined by how fast I could run or how far I could throw. The logic, focus and stamina needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me. Unlike in hiking, among that group of friends, I was the leader.
When Gates' school got a (DEC) PDP-8 — which cost $8,500 — "For a challenge, I decided I would try to write a version of the Basic programming language for the new computer..." And Gates remembers a long hike where "I silently honed my code" for its formula evaluator: I slimmed it down more, like whittling little pieces off a stick to sharpen the point. What I made seemed efficient and pleasingly simple. It was by far the best code I had ever written...
By the time school started again in the fall, whoever had lent us the PDP-8 had reclaimed it. I never finished my Basic project. But the code I wrote on that hike, my formula evaluator — and its beauty — stayed with me. Three and a half years later, I was a sophomore in college not sure of my path in life when Paul Allen, one of my Lakeside friends, burst into my dorm room with news of a groundbreaking computer. I knew we could write a Basic language for it; we had a head start.
Gates typed his code from that hike, "and with that planted the seed of what would become one of the world's largest companies and the beginning of a new industry."
Gates cites Richard Feynman's description of the excitement and pleasure of "finding the thing out" — the reward for "all of the disciplined thinking and hard work." And he remembers his teenaged years as "intensely driven by the love of what I was learning, accruing expertise just when it was needed: at the dawn of the personal computer."
dipshit (Score:5, Insightful)
learned absolutely nothing from Unix, never understood networking, stole a completely garbage toy program loader and called it an OS lol.
What a joke.
Re: dipshit (Score:2, Insightful)
He's way smarter than you. You reel of jealousy. Too bad you can't come up with any original ideas.
Re: dipshit (Score:4, Insightful)
that might well be. i admire the guy, he had a vision and pushed it through, and has had enormous impact indeed, but afaik one thing he never was is a brilliant or even good coder, let alone genius. it appears we always desire what we lack though so now he's just becoming one for posterity in his very own hagiography. applause. curtain.
Shooting for an informative moderation (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Too bad you can't come up with any original ideas.
That's just it. You don't get rich by developing original ideas. You get rich by letting other people do the hard work and then repackage it on the cheap.
Re: dipshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, Bill Gates got rich off a largely original idea: per unit software licensing.
Re: dipshit (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Bill Gates got rich off a largely original idea: per unit software licensing.
That was in no way a new idea. IBM had been doing it for ages.
Re: dipshit (Score:2)
*citation needed
Re: dipshit (Score:1)
I assume you're joking. Computers were so expensive in the 1960s that renting them was often the only way.
Re: dipshit (Score:2)
You rented the computer which came with software. Almost no one was buying boxed software.
Re: dipshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: dipshit (Score:5, Insightful)
er.. I think you meant "reek" and no it's not jealousy. Gates is rewriting history here.
I grew up in those times. We all knew ms-dos was stolen. We all knew Gates was an absolutely ruthless person who stole other's work, who lied constantly to promote his business (and lost in court over those lies), and a general dirt-bag. He was a *very* good sociopathic business person akin to Zuckerberg and Bezos.
So now he's using his wealth to rewrite history. I'm not jealous. I'm too old to be jealous. But we shouldn't let him try to leave a false impression in history of who he was.
Re: dipshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you. Your post should be put on the front page of the New York Times. Many of us lived those years. The amount of damage Microsoft did at the hands of Bill Gates was incredible. Definitely set us back in technological progress, to say the least.
Re: (Score:2)
So many times others were the great innovators and Bill and Steve spent millions and millions to crush those because they COULD threaten the Windows monopoly.
Sad that so many have no clue how he made his wealth and the many many lives of incredible innovators they destroyed or at the very least quieted to fringe areas of the technology segment.
I think he's feeling neglect
Re: dipshit (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to say with Gates. BASIC is very historically significant, but how many other people could have created something like that if they had had the same opportunities? As in access to expensive equipment, and rich well connected parents?
I've concluded that it's basically a waste of time trying to quantify this stuff.
Did not invent BASIC [Re: dipshit] (Score:5, Informative)
It's hard to say with Gates. BASIC is very historically significant, but how many other people could have created something like that if they had had the same opportunities?
Just to be clear, Gates did not "create" BASIC. BASIC was developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth when Gates was eight years old. They went on to make their compiler free, something Gates did not do.
Re: (Score:2)
It's hard to say with Gates. BASIC is very historically significant, but how many other people could have created something like that if they had had the same opportunities? As in access to expensive equipment, and rich well connected parents?
How does something so factually inaccurate get modded +5 Insightful? jfc.
https://calltolead.dartmouth.e... [dartmouth.edu]
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
He's way smarter than you. You reel of jealousy. Too bad you can't come up with any original ideas.
it takes no intelligence to be born in the upper class and ripping off everyone isn't intelligent, it's despicable, greedy and unethical, he's an evil person and all the upper class people like him are the real reason everything is going to hell
integrity is intelligent, greedy is stupid and self-defeating, what good is it to have the whole world but lose one's soul? He's lost his integrity, and any chance of being a decent person, indeed, he's the ultimate loser.
all these upper class people are the same, ad
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Which makes me wonder how much better the world would be if we actually gave intelligent people resources rather than distributing it randomly.
Re: (Score:2)
Neither did Bill Gates. He stole most of us his "ideas" from Apple and Xerox. Poorly as well.
Re: dipshit (Score:2)
Re: dipshit (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
It is a lot of work with an uncertain outc
Re: dipshit (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: dipshit (Score:5, Informative)
Was one of the biggest distributors of Unix at the time (by virtue of XENIX)
Doing networking non-Unix way doesn't mean not understanding networking
He didn't steal it, and it wasn't garbage. It was a simple, but very cleverly designed CP/M clone for the 8088 CPU. Unless you're talking about CP/M, of course. It was not garbage, either. It was the best thing that could happen to the 8080 CPU
Re: (Score:2)
Was one of the biggest distributors of Unix at the time (by virtue of XENIX)
XENIX was never Unix under any ownership. It was a unixlike, and less unixlike than Linux was by kernel 1.x.
He didn't steal it, and it wasn't garbage.
He didn't steal it, but it was garbage.
It was a simple, but very cleverly designed CP/M clone
It was not a CP/M clone at all, as it did not run CP/M software, which had to be ported to it.
Unless you're talking about CP/M, of course. It was not garbage, either. It was the best thing that could happen to the 8080 CPU
CP/M was pretty impressive for being able to run in 64kB. That's about the best thing you can say about it. The filesystem with four number codes instead of hierarchy was already dated at the time.
Re: dipshit (Score:2)
XENIX was never Unix, of course, because MS didn't have the needed license. Technically, however, for example, one of the early versions, XENIX 2.0 for the PDP-11 was virtually the same thing as the Unix V7 for the same architecture, with only minor changes. MS used this version as a starting point to develop XENIX 2.x for other architectures, like Zilog Z8000, Motorola MC68000 and Intel 8086.
Obviously, CP/M 8080 programs can't execute without major effort on a 8086, so I use another definition of a clone i
Re: (Score:2)
Xenix was, in fact, literally Unix. Microsoft licensed Unix from AT&T and their branded version was called Xenix.
I agree with you mostly on QD-OS/86DOS but I think you're overusing the term "clone" and defining it too widely - if all that's needed is ease of portability then GNU/Linux is a Windows clone, I mean, you can just link with the Wine libraries, right?
The relationship between CP/M and QD-OS/86DOS is a complex one but the only similarities in practice are two things:
- QD-OS had a compatible API
Re: dipshit (Score:2)
I mostly agree with what you wrote. I only want to note that the original FAT8 filesystem had 9 bytes dedicated for the full file name, which usually translated to 6 chars of filename and 3 chars of extension.
Re: (Score:2)
Some people say that 86-Dos was garbage. Yet there was nothing better than it.
For the 8086, you might be right. For the 80286, there was the aforementioned Xenix. DOS was a reasonable way to run programs which needed to run exclusively, so I don't actually believe it had no purpose. On the other hand, its command syntax was weirdly different from other CLI-based systems for no apparent reason, but to many people's annoyance and in ways that persist into the modern era in Microsoft programs with inherited syntax.
Microsoft was actually well aware of this, and at one point even released
Re: (Score:2)
> CP/M, of course. It was not garbage, either.
CP/M's file system WAS shit though. Designed by an engineer completely clueless how about people name things. That idiotic 8.3 filename convention set the entire industry back DECADES when QDOS copied it and Bill Gates bought and then renamed it MS-DOS. Even my old Apple 2 computer had 30 character filenames WITH spaces.
Compare and contrast to Unix's beautiful file system that could mount devices off of /.
--
Those that don't understand Unix are condemned to
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Jesus fucking Christ, you're making me defend BILL FUCKING GATES. Asshole.
Of all the criticisms to make of Gates you've managed to miss every single one:
- Unix was the first operating system Microsoft licensed. At the time though the resources necessary to run it far outpaced what was in a personal computer of the time, where 16K was considered "A lot of RAM" and MMUs were non-existent. An early project after Microsoft bought MS DOS was to make it more Unix-like so eventually it could be a "single tasking U
Re: (Score:2)
- Gates didn't "steal" QD-OS/86DOS. He licensed it, and then ultimately bought it. If you're referring to the fact QD-OS is supposedly a rip-off of CP/M, it isn't. It has a compatible API and a similar file path convention. That's about it. The file system on QD-OS/86DOS was an expanded version of FAT from the start.
This is true as far as you go... Seattle Computer Products, from whom Microsoft legitimately licensed, then bought, what became MS-DOS, may have used CP/M as an inspiration (and Gary Kidall maintained there is plenty of evidence they ripped one or two things straight out of CP/M).
It was for the Altair. (Score:3)
Altairs had a little as 1K memory and you entered the boot loader by hand using binary switches. I got a lot of practice with octal using that very Altair computer that bill gates gifted my high school.
Why octal you might ask and not hex. The importance of hex only emerged after we started trying programs. But when you had to enter machine code by hand using 16 dip switches in a row octal could be done using three fingers on each hand. Try to slap four switches at the same time is two spastic a movement
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
What an incredibly rich and successful dumbass.
Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Another issue of "Rich Geezer's Dream of His Childhood as a Genius".
I'll wait for the chapter when he describes how his mom sold the DOS he bought from someone else to IBM.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously.. it's more likely that Gates is a fuckin liar and he mostly got lucky. The guy is desperate to make himself look like a hero for some reason.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously.. it's more likely that Gates is a fuckin liar and he mostly got lucky. The guy is desperate to make himself look like a hero for some reason.
Sounds like Presidential material ... /s
Re: (Score:1)
Luck always has a hand in success. You can do everything right and bad luck kills you. You can literally do stupid stuff and a lucky break suddenly makes that stupid stuff the right thing to have done.
Gates *is a fuckin liar* but he was an absolutely ruthless business person that built on the luck he got. He's also much smarter than average and had a privileged childhood that gave him access to schooling and hardware most people never had. I would say his success is over 50% hard work, sharp dealing, l
Re:Oh noes! (Score:4, Informative)
I'll wait for the chapter when he describes how his mom sold the DOS he bought from someone else to IBM.
I know you're just being facetious, but I have to correct you on the apparent order there. If I recall correctly, they did not have a DOS yet when his mother hooked his company up with IBM. They simply claimed to have one, then bought one to make the deal with IBM, which was not actually a sale, but a contract to provide the DOS on IBM PCs. It was all pretty scammy and about family connections of course.
Re: (Score:2)
More critically it's a mix-up of various things in history.
Gates' mother may have had a small hand in Microsoft being introduced to IBM in the first place, but it's likely they'd have talked to him anyway. The reason IBM reached out to Microsoft wasn't over an operating system - they originally intended to run CP/M - but over BASIC. By the late 1970s, Microsoft BASIC had become the dominant standard for CP/M machines and many home computers. Commodore ran it from day #1. Apple and Radio Shack switched to it
Re: (Score:2)
One other point: if Gates' mother had been asked to lobby on behalf of her son, the IBM PC would probably have been 68000 based. Gates hated the pick of the 8088 and said that early on in a way others have verified.
Well, that would have been more expensive, so that would have been a much bigger expense than a contract for an OS from what was a tiny, tiny company at the time. That does seem to suggest that Gates' mother would have been a very effective lobbyist, which suggests to me that her influence was not all that limited. Whether they would have gone with Microsoft or not, I think the family connections certainly could not have hurt.
True of all coding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all (Score:1)
but the design and layout [of software development] is done while walking around or doing other things.
Most of my serious software development work was/is done at a desk, intentionally, with either a computer or old-school pen/pencil-and-paper to record my thoughts before they disappear.
That said, I do have inspiration that comes "out of the blue" when I'm doing other things. If I think it's viable, I'll write it down or record it somehow so I can get back to it later.
I'm not denying that Art Challenor's experience is as he claims nor am I denying that it may be a common experience in the industry. I'm just
Re: True of all coding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed -- while at my computer I usually come up with the obvious solution, which works okay. Then I'll go for a walk, and halfway through the walk I'll realize, apropos of nothing, that there is a much better/simpler/faster approach that I could use instead, so I'll enter a reminder on my phone and reimplement the code when I get home.
Taking a step back from the grindstone is always a good idea. It gives me a chance to see the bigger picture.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
One reason I'm inconsistent at manual tasks is that my mind wanders, not staying focused on the task at hand. My mind hates repetition. It's why I like to get computers to do the grunt work for me.
I remember seeing an ad for the HERO kit robot in the early 80's and thinking, if I could afford one, I'd try to program it to do my house chores. Sure, that was a long-shot with nascent systems, but I couldn't get the idea out of my mind: "How could I get a bot to recognize a cup or a sock?" And my damned brother
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Nothing about Gates' background is unique. How many gen x folks have you heard who used to phreak or got caught hacking for real. Gates just happened to be in the right place with a lot of privilege at the right time. I mean even in the summary it's about how he was playing with a phone line at a private school. How much you wanna bet he didn't get in trouble for making toll calls. I got one month of unfettered phone access, ran up a $120 phone bill and was banned from ever using a modem for 4 years.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have done a lot of 'coding' on long drives through the countryside. Unfortunately, my parents weren't rich and connected, nor did I break the law.
As a result, I am not a billionaire trying to whitewash my own history and convince the world to love and respect me as better than them.
a dream (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate MS and Apple as much as the next guy, but I can relate to some of it, didn't have a computer when I was learning assembler from a book at 11-12 years of age, write my game code into a paper notebook, much later was able to transfer it to a soviet ripoff of IBM (DVK 2) and see it execute, it was fun. I understand what moved Bill to start what he was doing, he got exceptionally lucky with his sequence of life events, as a child or a teen he had a dream and he was lucky to be able to convert that into a hugely profitable enterprise, hood for him. Many of us had some form of a dream in the same field, many of us got something useful out of those dreams I think.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm a little older so I was playing with TTL chips from Radio Shack for a couple of years until I was 14 before there was a computer to have. But then with the help of a Z80 instruction set reference card, within a year I was disassembling MS-BASIC and learning assembly language from actual Bill Gates code. The crazy thing is that one of the things I still do for fun these days is look at all the various versions of it on different architectures.
Anyhow, he got a little lucky here and there, had family conn
(*Doubtful Grunt*) (Score:2)
As such, I'm not willing to completely write off Gates' claim as auto-hagiographic twaddle. But it rings pretty damned hollow.
F U Bill Gates (Score:1)
You're a loser if you're writing code in your head while you're hiking.
Um no (Score:1)
BASIC was established long before gates. He contributed nothing to the corpus of the code. Disregarding that it passed parameters by vajue and was useless so is bulk gates.
I know. You get older. Books try and make you look good. Bill took IBM for millions with whole MSdos pcdos. Ugly zuke knockoff
Re: (Score:2)
And Pascal was established long before UCSD and Borland? He created a version of it that became very popular, and for over a decade it was licensed to a significant fraction of microcomputer vendors. MS-DOS got him more than a little money from IBM, it got him an operating system to turn into a standard where Microsoft became the gatekeeper of most of the computer industry. To my annoyance it ended up on one of the worse architectures to come out of the 80s. The x86 has been such a mess for so long, and it
Bill Gates Began the Altair BASIC Code in His Head (Score:1)
Bill is wise
Bill is good
Trust Bill....
Original source code (Score:1)
Original source code or it didn't happen.
Re: (Score:2)
Once there... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The sad part is, it's mostly true. I based my joke on actual stuff I've read about people trying to look at MS-BASIC source code listings. I did make an effort to avoid the obvious HHGG reference.
Fortunately we do have a few versions out there to use as reference. I was able to mostly correlate the Altair 6800 version with the 6502 listing. My holy grail is still to find a binary-math 68000 version executable other than the old Macintosh version. (The Macintosh version is fractured into dozens of code segm
Re: Original source code (Score:4, Informative)
It's available at GitHub, or at least the source code of Altair Basic 4K is available, which is very close to the original.
Re: (Score:2)
The sources that I'm aware of are an early 8080 version, a later 8080 version for CP/M, an 8086 version for MS-DOS, and a 6502 version which still maintains some hints of its minicomputer cross-compiler history (and which correlates well with the Altair 680 binary). The original code was made using a lot of macros such that apparently with the right set of macros you could generate code for it to run on a PDP-10, which was how it was developed. That was the computer that he was allegedly "stealing" time on
Re: (Score:1)
I would love to see the assembly language source code for the version of BASIC that runs on the 8085 processor in the Tandy Model 100 (and 102 and 200). Supposedly this is some of the last code that Gates actually had a hand in writing himself. The code runs from a ROM in the laptop. People have disassembled the assembly code, so you can figure out WHAT it does, and HOW it does it, but the source code listing would have the comments that explain WHY it does things that particular way. This version of BASIC
It is true! (Score:1)
Yes. I was the compiler.
Embellishment (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish that people like Gates would acknowledge their success was mostly the result of a number of pieces falling into place. Bill Gates clearly took an early interest in computers, long before it became a mainstream thing. But turning that early interest into a business, was mostly the result of the early days of computing being in their formative stage. At this stage in any new technology, there are ample opportunities for people to get established, many will fall along the wayside, but others will succeed and given their early entry, become established as a big player.
The fact is Bill Gates had the good fortune to be born at a time when computers were just starting to get established and he had the access to them that most people didn’t have. He took an interest in computers and his innovation at the time was simply realising he could make money from this technology, while most other people were treating it as a hobby. Plenty of other people had similar ideas, but he benefited from the connection to IBM. If it were not for this, he probably would have remained a small business.
What really turned Microsoft into a huge company, was the ruthless way the company went about gaining market share and holding onto it. It is clear that Bill Gates got a taste of small scale success in the early days, and that gave him the confidence and enthusiasm to grow into what Microsoft became.
So, boy with a geeky interest managed to turn that interest into a small business that had a lucky break that gave them an opportunity to become a big business. Once they got there, through being ruthless they managed to hold on to and grow that business into one of the biggest tech companies in the world. So if anything Bill deserves to be given credit for managing to hold onto that market where others would have lost it due to not being ruthless enough.
Re: (Score:2)
So we should give credit to him for illegal business practices? He unlawfully stole software. He unlawfully used his market position to bully other companies out of areas they wanted to work in. This was done numerous times.
Sadly, the government did a piss poor job in prosecuting that case.
So give credit to someone that constantly broke the law? I think not.
What a strange anecdote (Score:3)
So you are saying that you thought about the implementation details of what most have identified as a derivative of DEC BASIC-PLUS before you had access to a PDP. You also once said that there was a "Chinese wall" between the app and OS divisions at Microsoft.
Well, do get this: (Score:5, Interesting)
Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to define my own measure of success, and it seemed limitless, not determined by how fast I could run or how far I could throw.
Pretty much the #1 reason for the nerd/geek approach to life. I love programming and I love outdoor activities that aren't tied to arbitrary and rigid measures of performance like in classic track & field sports. If find those quite boring actually.
No genius in sight anywhere (Score:2, Redundant)
The common thread of all the significant
In all cases the technology part was secondary. The diving force of personal insecurity is a much bigger factor than the hard ideas..
Look at the psychological makeup of all the people who have actually influenced history
No way it went like that (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
He stole computer time at the local college, and dumpster-dove for source code to the BASIC others there were working on. He admitted as such decades ago, now he's trying to whitewash/rewrite history.
He bought MS-DOS from another dev in the area, relabelled it and then sold it to IBM via a contact he got into IBM's management via his mother's social circle.
He had the arrogance and nerve to shame members of the Homebrew Computer Club for sharing code for free amongst themselves, stating that he thought softw
Congrats Bill, I too discovered recursion (Score:4, Insightful)
and? (Score:2)
Every single invention ever created by anyone ever started in their fucking head. Fuck Bill Gates.
tiresome (Score:4, Informative)
I'm really tired of him. He's smart, sure, but has been self-promoting to clean up his image for decades. Massive ego. Big climate footprint. If you want to see info on someone who's _REALLY_ smart look at Fabrice Bellard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. There are many others.
Priorities... (Score:1)
My beginnings (Score:2)
When I was about 14, I bought a book on BASIC. I didn't have a computer or access to a computer, so I wrote programs with a pencil and paper.
At age 15, I entered a school that had some Commodore PETs. Of course, none of my programs worked, partly because the BASIC dialect was a bit different and mostly because they were buggy.
But I do remember the excitement I felt learning BASIC and the knowledge that software development was what I wanted as a career. Many decades later, I've retired from a long and
Then He Bought MS-DOS (Score:2)
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I saw his interview (video on WSJ) (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Who met with him? Oh yeah, that's right.
https://newrepublic.com/post/1... [newrepublic.com]
"Blue billionaire is so much better than red billionaire! They are our friends!"
Will he 'forget' to mention dumpster-diving for it (Score:2)
He full-on admitted decades ago that he dumpster-dived for some of the BASIC source code at college, and outright burgled into the labs to steal computer time to work on what would ultimately become MS BASIC.
Never forget, he was a conniving ruthless huckster. A smart one, but nonetheless. Don't let him whitewash his legacy.
Not a special skill (Score:2)
I remember doing math proofs in my head (Score:1)
On the way from class to the dorm in college. It was at once exhilerating and mundane. The mundane part came with the realization that plenty of people use their brains to plan for the future. That's what it's for, after all.
He's a GOD (Score:2)
LoB
Print the legend :o (Score:2)
Could be worse (for a tech billionaire) (Score:2)
Look, anybody that makes that much money has some serious flaws. Frankly, the government would be doing them and us a favor by making that level of wealth much harder to obtain by good wealth redistribution.
Of course, he, like all billionaires, had access to existing wealth and connections to get where he was. You don't start a business when you worry about paying for food, rent or if a single accident or illness could bankrupt you or your loved ones. Which is why the safety net in America is constantly bei
Re: (Score:2)
Do you mean like the below. Despite MS pushing WinNT server as the Internet ecommerce platform for the future
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: “ Windows NT