Ahh, my PC life began when I WON a TRS-80 (4k!) in a drawing when my local Radio Shack store opened. Learned BASIC on that machine... I thought I'd been dumped into a black hole when I went into the 'monitor' program.
Sold it a year later for $1,000.
Used the proceeds to buy/build a Heathkit H-89 running 'HDOS' and 'Benton Harbor BASIC'.
I never played with punched card products but did spend time in college learning assembly on the DEC PDP-8.... still have the punched tape.
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as an aside: The person who wrote HDOS/Benton Harbor BASIC was J. Gordon Letwin.
I found an article about him the other day (here are a few paragraphs):
...Bill Gates had abandoned Harvard in his second year to launch Microsoft with his high-school friend, Paul Allen. Allen preferred dealing with the technology, and so it was the business-minded Gates' job to sell the fledgling PC world on Microsoft's version of BASIC. At about the same time, Letwin had landed a job out of Purdue University writing systems software for Heath Company, which had developed its own personal-computer kit. But when Gates knocked on Heath's door in late 1977, Letwin was not particularly pleased.
"I went out there in the days that we had about 10 people, all programmers," recalls Gates, beginning to laugh as he tells the story. "So I would go around and talk to manufacturers about using our BASIC. They had Gordon come in the room. He had written (his own version of) BASIC. Of course his BASIC, he thought, was better than mine.
"There are different ways to do this stuff. His had some advantages which he was pointing out to me. We ended up in this argument between two technical guys. There were about 15 people in the room and no one else could follow along. We're talking all in terms of the data structure, single representations, double scan, stuff like that.... Like if you typed in a bad line, his would immediately check the syntax, and mine wouldn't. Which is one of the negative points of our design. Anyway, he was being very sarcastic about that, telling me how dumb that was.
"They didn't know what to do with Gordon. They knew he was super good, but they couldn't really understand what Gordon was up to or what he was going to do. So they decided to buy our BASIC, which really teed Gordon off."
It was not your standard job interview, but like two boxers after a match, the two software scientists left the ring if not friends, with mutual respect. Gates took Letwin to dinner.
"Everyone thought I was just going to go away with the impression that this guy was just some prima dona. But Gordon was in on micros super early," says Gates. "And I walked away from that knowing that Gordon was a very, very smart programmer."
About nine months later, in 1978, Gates talked Letwin into joining Microsoft.
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Letwin was one of Microsoft's first dozen programmers and the chief architect of OS/2, which morphed into NT.
In 1981 Letwin was granted 293,850 shares of MSFT
(I always wondered why portions of HDOS executable code had "In memory of JGL" imbedded in it.) |
