Microsoft’s original source code

Sure, but in those days spellcheckers were separate apps - the most popular at the time being CorrectStar from MicroPro.

They weren't integrated into programming-oriented editors, and it would have been unusual to run them against code.

That's the fault of modern websites being massive JavaScript ad-playing behemoths instead of sub-1kB served HTML as god intended.

Floating point math was a key feature on these early machines, since it opened up the "glorified desk calculator" use case. This was one use for them (along with gaming and use as a remote terminal) that did not require convenient data storage, which would've been a real challenge before disk drives became a standard. And the float implementation included in BASIC was the most common back in the day. (There are even some subtle differences between it and the modern IEEE variety that we'd be familiar with today.)

I remember my old Tandy Color Computer booting up and referencing Microsoft BASIC:

https://tinyurl.com/2jttvjzk

The computer came with some pretty good books with example BASIC programs to type in.

You should upload the audio to the Internet Archive!

Allen had to write the loader in machine code, which was toggled in on the Altair console. The BASIC interpreter itself was loaded from paper tape via the loader and a tape reader. The first BASIC program Allen ran on the Altair was apparently "2 + 2", which worked - i.e. it printed "4" I'd like to have such confidence in my own code, particularly the I/O, which must have been tricky to emulate on the Dec10.

Consider that nobody ever sat in countless meetings asking "How can we use the PC?" They either saw the vision and went for it, or eventually ran up against the limitations of working without a PC and bought in.

That came out of millions of dollars and man hours of investment by Google and OpenAi.

VS

Some college students selling software they didn't have and getting it ready from 0 to sellable in 2 months which led to a behemoth that still innovates to this day.

The printout also contains dates 6-SEP-64 below it, any idea what those are?

(It's a high-res image of the printed code.)

I attempted OCR with OCRmyPDF / Tesseract. It's not great, but it's under 1% the size, at least. https://github.com/pronoiac/altair-basic-source-code

Thanks for the Democracy Now interview! His description of "tech layoffs" is the most concise framing I've heard to describe what I've felt about it:

"Cosmetic offering to the financial markets to show that Silicon Valley still can control its labor costs... It's less the future flow of funds is improved ... than that they're signaling something to the markets ..."

https://youtu.be/j7jPzzjbVuk?si=YSbUW8h2mNktzj_9&t=634

As a fellow 90s kid... I feel the same. I remember when Sony Ericson launched their first camera phone and how we used to go through PC upgrades like crazy. My dad would go to the bookstore to buy magazines with new linux distros included for free. Now I have laptop thats 4 years old and Im not excited to buy my next (heck I dont even need to buy my next... I can run LLama.cpp just fine on my current).

I do think the barrier to entry in tech has significantly increased. There was a wave of internet companies like Uber, (and their global equivalents) that benefited massively from providing local internet services. In the 2000s and 2010s the tech companies benefited massively from global poverty alleviation efforts to get users in remote regions on line. The push to get people online meant that millions of people in poor countries had access to social media and ads but not basic needs like toilets. As the tech companies saturated the emerging markets, covid began to hit. The stark inequalities began to be rubbed in. The big tech companies also dont really have any real material asset to fight over anymore. Their markets have been largely captured. As a big tech firm the game is now to maintain your lead. The industry is now run by MBAs, not hackers anymore.

I think what you are remembering is just nostalgia, people tend to remember the good things and shut out the bad ones.

I still remember how Microsoft, under Gates, acted like a robber baron to the whole tech community. You had a nice product? It was instantly copied by Microsoft, and they pulled the rug under you because they could.

You wanted open standards? It was a war purely because Microsoft wanted it to be. It was either Microsoft's way or the highway.

I consider pre-2008 and pre-iPhone launch to be the peak of the Internet, but it's all downhill from that year onwards.

>It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was.

Three letters: MBA

When the MBA's came into the tech industry everything got stale, 'safe' and unexciting as they want to leech their fucking hands over everything in the name of maximal profit.

Private Equity follows MBAs so you see more PE firms getting into tech during the same period. Same story, fucking leeches leeching makes the leeches happy at the expense of society. In fact, it seems PE firms and MBA grads love making the world an actively terrible place

I hate business bros. They ruin god damn everything.

It is interesting, especially in the context of Gates childhood upbringing and his extremely rare access to computers and computer training.

Something that maybe one or two other dozen children had access to in the entire country during that time (60s/70s).

You have to also remember that computers were also seen as a public good for a large swath of users during this time too.

Makes you wonder how different this industry would be if we replaced Bill Gates singular childhood privilege with that of Bill Joy's (which looks like your typical middle class experience)? Only instead of one child, you could probably help thousands of children.

This is consistent with the parent comment. You can have a hacker mindset and be totally against open source. They are orthogonal qualities.

My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example.

So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening.

But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things.

If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly.

Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way.

Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?

IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.

Gates was obviously a proficient coder. I think you're experiencing a time compression phenomenon here: this was the mid 70s. Microsoft the big bad Microsoft that everyone knows about didn't appear until around the mid 90s. 20 years later, although from the perspective of 2025 those two eras seem pretty much adjacent.

And then all the folks that used to write M$ served the open Web in a plate to Google, now with the exception of Safari, what we have is ChromeOS, in browser, and being packaged in "native" apps.

> Was Gates especially proficient with code?

Well the article is obviously a biased source, but surely developing a) an ALTAIR emulator for PDP-10s (Allen) and b) a pretty much full-fledged BASIC interpreter that was exclusively tested on top of said emulator (Gates) in two months, in the 70s was not the kind of stuff an average coder would have done.

This also how I read the story, they were ‘basically’ salesmen/marketing guys with good investor storytime. The hacking part was hacking together code on the plane before the meeting to rake in the cash?

BASIC was written as a team in Albuquerque. Altair had good reason to support their efforts. They then purchased DOS from Seattle Computer Products after they made a deal with IBM to sell it. To be fair Xerox gave away the office suite and the hardware to anyone who asked.

As a kid of the late 90s i feel like it was kinda unfair.

Back in the day (70s(?)80s) computers shipped with the programming language manual. All I got was a CDROM of ENCARTA and a slip to mail in for a restore set of MS DOS / WIN 3.1 diskettes(which was sorely needed I might add).

It's very easy to hate on him for that very reason. He's just buying a good reputation for the fraction of his wealth that is completely insignificant.

If I could buy that kind of reputation by tossing a few coins into the void, why not? Especially after I've stolen billions from others.

Its possible. He is following the same tactics as when he was head of MS [1].

1. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...

In "In the Beginning was the Command Line" Neal Stephenson used a car analogy to describe consumer operating systems, I always thought his analogy was pretty apt:

To paraphrase him a little bit:

Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network of dealerships with mechanics on staff.

Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are expensive.

Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from sophisticated space aged materials.

The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...

Yup! Which is why I use Linux but you better believe I've got Sublime Text installed (and licensed!)

Yeah, corporations have the resources to do that kind of investment in Linux which random hobbiests don't.

But why do they do it in the first place, instead of investing in their own obviously supiriour massively invested in OS's? Because Linux IS better, and the whole idea of it is better than some closed source crap. By nature of the GPL license it will snowball and everyone else will be left behind.

This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM.

I'm sure that helped its momentum in the corporate space, where it was already very present, but the whole family of Linux was very well established in servers, firewalls (more BSD than Linux here), mobile devices, embedded hardware, etc

I don’t have an opinion on the issue, cause it’s outta my wheelhouse. Well, aside from civility, which you need to work on.