Comment by ThrowawayR2

Comment by ThrowawayR2 9 days ago

> "...so printouts of code would be thrown in trash. And that's where Bill Gates found the source code for Basic interpreter, which he ported and it became the first Microsoft product"

Both sources you link to say Allen and Gates pulled listings of the PDP-10 operating system out (probably DEC's TOPS-10?) of the trash. BASIC is not an operating system. So your claim is debunked by your own sources.

"...digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

"...He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system..."

https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx

outside1234 9 days ago

And Apple stole a UI from Xerox Parc. Open AI stole everyone's content.

This is how the industry innovates

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exidy 9 days ago

This is a myth. Jobs negotiated access to PARC technology as part of a deal in which Xerox bought shares in Apple at $10/share[0], selling about a year later at $22/share. Those shares would be worth around $5 billion today.
Xerox did later sue Apple for IP infringement, however most of their claims were dismissed[1].
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
[1] https://arlingtonmnnews.com/articles/bits-and-bytes/xerox-ve...

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- mmooss 9 days ago
  
  > Xerox bought shares in Apple at $10/share[0], selling about a year later at $22/share.
  > [0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
  I searched the cite for the 'share', '10', '22', 'sold, 'sell', 'bought', 'buy', 'purchase', and found nothing. ?
  
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  exidy 8 days ago
  
  Apologies, I was juggling multiple sources. The Xerox VC investment into Apple is a matter of public record, the figure of $10/share is widely quoted, including in the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs[0].
  Exactly how and when Xerox disposed of its shares is not public record, but it's known to be around that timeframe and certainly Xerox made a profit. The book _Dealers of Lightning_ goes into more detail about the deal if you're interested[1].
  [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/why-your-computer-has-a-mous...
  [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Light...
  
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mycall 9 days ago

Now AIs are stealing from AIs.

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breadwinner 9 days ago

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pdw 9 days ago

That article is a bit confusing because it's using the term "BASIC" to refer to both the language and Microsoft's implementation. But what it's trying to say is that Microsoft's BASIC implementation was licensed by many computer companies (including Commodore and Atari) and that those companies changed and extended it in incompatible ways.

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- breadwinner 9 days ago
  
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  pdw 9 days ago
  
  Bill Gates did not write it by himself, Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff also worked on it. And they did not have a finished product after 8 weeks -- only a demo. The first commercial release was "version 2", half a year later.
  
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  pcunite 9 days ago
  
  Podcast with Monte Davidoff
  https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-113-monte-davidoff...
  Starts after about the first 15 minutes.
  
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  ThrowawayR2 9 days ago
  
  How would Bill Gates copy source code from a 36-bit minicomputer with 32 kilowords (no byte addressing) of memory and a time-sharing operating system to a 8 bit microprocessor with a completely different instruction set and 4 kilobytes of memory and no operating system, just bare metal? Even if he and Allen had had the source code for BASIC-10, which you haven't provided evidence of, it would be closer to a reimplementation than a port.
  And DEC was in Massachusetts, Bill Gates went to high school in Washington. That would be one hell of a road trip to dig into DEC's trash.
  
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  breadwinner 9 days ago
  
  I think it was C-Cubed's trash, but it was DEC's IP. See: https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/
  
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  sitharus 9 days ago
  
  None of us write programs from first principles, it's all based on code we've read before. If I was going to write a BASIC interpreter I'd read up on the basics of interpreters, literature which would include sample code, and look at other interpreters' code.
  No matter where you think the code came from, the impact of Microsoft BASIC was huge, and they were first to the market.
  
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  ForOldHack 9 days ago
  
  BASIC was " BASIC, developed at Dartmouth College, was initially designed for and ran on a GE-225 mainframe computer paired with a Datanet-30 processor, which handled communications with Teletype terminals. " I got into the game on HP BASIC, also with teletype ASR-33s, I was only 9.
  
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sanswork 9 days ago

That's not what that says at all. It says that the language was slightly different depending on the platform.
Microsoft basic wasn't the first basic interpreter which is a different claim than Microsoft basic source was copied from another interpreter.

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ThrowawayR2 9 days ago

What part of that paragraph you quoted suggests that Microsoft BASIC wasn't original work?

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daeken 9 days ago

Those were their own ports, as per the page you just linked. They developed Microsoft BASIC.
"The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer."

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