How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 478.04

-1.1%

Jan 8 3:59 PM EST

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To: JC Jaros who wrote (51621)	10/19/2000 9:55:07 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (3) of 74651

JC - re"From what I understand, the BASIC that Bill Gates decided everyone was stealing though was *stolen!" Not the case at all. You have now gotten far enough back in time to where I have actual hands-on experience <G>. The original "Micro-Soft" BASIC was a classic clean room development - Gates and Allen developed, from the ground up, an OS for the MITS ALTAIR which executed a subset of the Dartmouth BASIC instruction set. Since the instruction set was in the common domain, there was never any question of "stealing". The only taint on that development is that some of the early work was done on a Harvard time-sharing machine which was not supposed to be used for "commercial" purposes. I was supervising a University computer lab at that time (1975-76) and we bought 5 of the Altair machines as a project for grad students. Just getting the machines running was a challenge as the memory cards did not work right, the bus was flakey, and there was virtually no documentation. Some of the students actually built their own memory cards for the machine. The only software available was the BASIC from "Micro-Soft". We got source code for that BASIC - on both paper tape and cassette, since the cassette interface did not work too well. We had a cross-compiler on a PDP-11 which we used to develop a more reliable cassette interface. We gave that code back to Paul Allen (who was doing the cassette interface). Maybe this was an early "open source" development effort?

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