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<@stkai> Fun fact, GW-BASIC was a descendant of the original Altair BASIC. The "Translation created 10-Feb-83" headers on each source file refer to tooling Microsoft had that automatically translated the 8080 assembly to 8086 (it shouldn't be taken as a build date since they were manually modified after that point). Besides GW-BASIC, source code for the 6502 and 6809 rewrites of Microsoft BASIC were available up to this point (see https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774 and https://github.com/davidlinsley/DragonBasic) but I believe this is the first public release of the original 8080 BASIC code.

<@stkai> Shouldn't it be "valiant" ?

<@nilsbunger> The design is fun and gave me a lot of nostalgia, but I admit they overdid it. They could have made that piece feel the same without so much distraction. And please people, support reader mode. It's not hard and it shouldn't be optional.

EDIT: Good god they animated EVERYTHING. It's not even readable... also... not one inline code sample? This is the designer trying to get an awwwards site of the day without any interest in the actual content. It's like a guitar player that solos over everyone else's solos.

<@nilsbunger> On top of the poor readability, my 2-year-old laptop can't even navigate through the page without CPU and GPU going insane, and my fans blasting at max speed. It's the poorest, choppiest web performance I can recall, all for what should be a simple blog post.

<@nilsbunger> Yes, I was shocked that Bill Gates's personal blog seems to have that "500 WordPress plugins" kinda vibe. Kinda reminds me of my old MySpace profile.

<@nilsbunger> FWIW the spinning scrolling effects of Apple release announcements are nearly as bad.

<@nilsbunger> Personally I like it :) Tastes differ.

<@nilsbunger> Makes me wonder: did Bill write all of this text? Did he decide this effect is cool and must go in? Did he even know about that text effect?

<@nilsbunger> I think it’s important to remember how he got to where he is and what kind of person it takes - Behind the Bastards is a fairly good reality check for most people we give kudos to https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-the-ballad-of...

<@nilsbunger> I think it's pretty cool

<@nilsbunger> Also, the text font on that page has an incredibly irritating lowercase "f".

<@nilsbunger> I think it's really cute and endeared me to it immediately

<@nilsbunger> “All he’s done for the world” by copyrighting Covid vaccine, eh?

<@zabzonk> >Writing a BASIC interpreter, with floating point, is much harder. Gates, Allen and other collaborators BASIC was pretty damned good.

The floating point routines are Monte Davidoff's work. But yes, Gates and Allen writing Altair BASIC on the Harvard PDP-10 without ever actually seeing a real Altair, then having it work on the first try after laboriously entering it with toggle switches at MITS in Albuquerque, was a remarkable achievement.

<@zabzonk> Fun facts, according to Jobs for some unknown reasons Wozniak refused to add floating point support to Apple Basic thus they had to license BASIC with floating point numbers from Microsoft [1].

[1] Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/bill-steve-jobs-remini...

<@zabzonk> I agree - it's a useful BASIC that can do math and fits in 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory.

And Bill Gates complaining about pirating $150 Altair BASIC inspired the creation of Tiny BASIC, as well as the coining of "copyleft".

<@zabzonk> I still have a cassette tape with Microsoft Basic for the Interact computer. It's got an 8080.

<@Barrin92> To be fair they definitely faked it, they said they had source code for a program they hadn't even written yet! They were just also very serious about the "making it" part.

<@Barrin92> IMO although it was complex, the human brain could still manage the complexity back then. Reading Woz's autobiography, it feels he knew what every logic gate on the original Apple computer did.

The PDP-10 probably worked at "human speed" too...

<@Barrin92> > It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make it"

They are the all-time greatest in fake-it-til-you-make-it. They got the IBM PC OS contract without having an OS, which they bought from someone else (iirc).

> What stands out to me about Gates and Allen is the serious technical chops. Writing an emulator for the PDP-10 and then an interpreter, line editor, I/O system all in 4KB of memory.

Is that really so impressive? Everything then was in 4K, from all coders.

<@jwnin> Having lived through pcs, internet, mobile, social, crypto and ai, I’d say mobile or social has been the biggest so far and AI is likely to be vastly larger impact. Of course they build on each other. But the global impact of mobile and social vastly exceed that of the pc era.

<@jwnin> Android? Internet? Reddit?

<@jwnin> The Internet?

<@jwnin> I mean… The AI?

<@jer0me> The printout is dated 10-SEP-75 and is labeled "VERSION 3.0 -- MORE FEATURES TO GO".

Curiously this isn't the oldest extant version of the source code. The Harvard archives have a copy of version 1.1, printed on 30 April 75. http://altairbasic.org/other%20versions/ian.htm

<@jer0me> Thank you for the warning. I once used up my Internet package's entire monthly quota by following a similar link on Hacker News.

<@jer0me> Ironic for something designed to take up only 4KB on its target machine :)

<@jer0me> Nice one. Has anyone OCRed this back into text?

<@n0rdy> That's interesting to consider. Some of the GNU code is getting quite old and looking through it is a blast from the past. I'm frankly amazed that it continues to work so well. I suspect there is a relatively small group of GNU hackers out there rocking gray and white beards that are silently powering the foundations of our modern world, and I worry what's going to happen when they start retiring. Maybe we'll get rust rewrites of everything and a new generation will take over, but frankly I'm pretty worried about it.

<@n0rdy> I think to most (90+%?) software developers out their in the world, Assembler might as well be hieroglyphics. They/we can guess at the concepts involved of course, but actually being able to read the code end to end, and have a mental model of what is happening is not really going to happen. Not without some sort of Rosetta Stone. (Comments :) )

I think 2075 developers will feel the same way about modern Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.

They will think of themselves as software developers but they won't be writing code the same way, they'll be giving guided instructions to much higher level tools (perhaps AIs that themselves have a provenance back to modern LLMs)

Just as today there will still be those that need to write low level critical code. There are still lots of people today that have to write Assembler, though end up expressing it via C or Rust. And there will be people still working on AI technology. But even those will be built off other AI's.

<@n0rdy> Has there ever been a moment in human history where we’ve (as a society, not as individuals) looked back and were envious?

So my money is that the code I wrote today is the joke of tomorrow - for all involved.

Also, I for one don’t want to go back to punch cards ;)

<@azemetre> added to my must-read list.

I notice his interview on Democracy Now : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jPzzjbVuk

This guys mental map is impressive, as are the color of his book titles : https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16872611.Malcolm_Harri...

<@MrFurious> Yeah, there's sort of a glitchy virus matrixy thing going on with the text as I scroll and it's really weird.

<@MrFurious> Everything Bill touches gets frozen at some point of time...

<@_fat_santa> Yea, well I would consider it that in the sense that it seems like a mix of his personal interests, history, and promotion of stuff he cares about (his biography and foundation and various projects he's on). Its a unique site because he has the cash to hire people who put a great UX experience on top of it all. I think that's the main difference.

Not that he's unique in this, but I do really appreciate his book lists. I usually grab a few books during the year based on his recommendations.

<@_fat_santa> Maybe Bill has really taken an interest in Javascript. /s

<@ChuckMcM> Why would they not allow it? They've published the source to numerous old products (including MS-DOS[1]), and they own GitHub...

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS

<@ChuckMcM> Funny enough last night I was hoping more old 90s Microsoft code got open sourced and I somehow was living under a rock. Maybe one day I'll get to legally dig through NT 3.51 code. especially since it was ported to MIPS and Power iirc. I went on a huge tangent reading about how someone ported leaked ntvdm code to x64. They didn't provide code and I didn't go hunting for the leaked stuff and won't...but I think it's super neat how forward portable some of the stuff NT has is.

<@ChuckMcM> I attempted OCR, and while it's not great, it's a start. I considered adding a reference to "software wants to be free!" or the Open Letter, but I'm winding down for the night. https://github.com/pronoiac/altair-basic-source-code

<@santiagobasulto> I’m a 90s kid (born in 1989), and I remember the days of the anti-trust lawsuit, “Internet Exploder,” the Slashdot Borg icon, and resentment from Mac users, WordPerfect users, Netscape users, and others who strongly disliked the Microsoft monopoly.

Still, there’s something about Microsoft of that era. Bill Gates was “one of us,” a passionate nerd. This was an era where nerds like Jobs, Woz, and Gates ruled. The 1990s and the 2000s felt exciting, and it felt like technology was making the world a better place.

I must admit, even though I was firmly in the Jobs and Woz camp in the 2000s, I also fondly remember Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, and pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. Contrary to Steve Jobs’ opinion, I believe Microsoft has occasionally exhibited great taste :). For better or for worse, the 1990s was peak Microsoft.

Something happened in the 2010s. 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.

Then again, I was a mere child in the 1990s, and I became an adult in the 2010s, and so I could be looking at the 1990s through childhood memories.

<@santiagobasulto> Allen wrote an 8080 emulator on a time shared PDP-10 in order for Gates to write the assembly code that implemented a BASIC interpreter - complete with I/O and editor - for a sight-unseen system, all in 4 kilobytes. And it worked the first time it was run.

I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays).

Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies them as pure breed hackers to me.

<@santiagobasulto> Gates showed his true colors right up front with the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", and pursued the rest of his career in like fashion. It's not just about Microsoft versus open source: many of us already resented their strong-arming, dominance-oriented, rent-seeking, ownership-hungry monopolistic approach to computing before the free software movement had really gotten going, or the term "open source" had even been invented.

<@santiagobasulto> How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read, they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.

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. They took over the office productivity software market by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly. Their initial and core success - getting DOS on IBM PCs, which led to the Windows monopoly - was simply leaping at a business opportunity, I think even before they began developing the product.

Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? Do you mind that they tried to destroy and monopolize the open web (thank you Mozilla!)?

<@santiagobasulto> Yes, it's called pulling the ladder up behind you. I don't think "he was a hacker" mitigates anything whatsoever.

<@santiagobasulto> Meh, I don't prefer OSS. I prefer tools that work well, whatever they may be. For a long time, that was Windows. Microsoft went to hell, so now it's Linux. I'll happily use commercial solutions so long as they're good.

<@santiagobasulto> The pure breed hacker just published source code in a 100 MB PDF.

<@santiagobasulto> It’s also kind of difficult to hate on a guy that devoted his remaining decades to literally saving tens of thousands of lives around the world.

<@starik36> It was distributed on paper tape. You needed a teletype with a paper tape reader to run it. Basically you would manually enter a bootloader using the switches on the Altair's front panel, and the bootloader would read BASIC off the tape and into RAM. If the checksum passed, it would then jump into BASIC. Here's a video of the process if you're interested: https://youtu.be/TxU_3dEJ2nM?t=1013

<@starik36> It was stored on a punched paper tape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#Origin_and_develo...

<@starik36> Paul Allen entered it in front of the customer for the first run

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

I expect it was distributed on tape as well.

<@ElijahLynn> I sort of knew the story, but the way Gates presents it in his article makes it pretty blunt. There is no contrition; rather it is a story of glorious success, a story of hard work to be proud of, all started by the lie. In fact, the lie is presented as the nucleating event, as positive thing that spurred them to turn the lie into truth.

To me it felt consonant with the ethics of Harvard, and more saliently, the fact that their founding event was a lie seems consonant with the trajectory of the company. The summary of the book makes it sound like the real title is "A Glorious Life", and I would expect no contrition about DR DOS, Netscape, and other Microsoft ruthlessness under Gates.

(To be fair, I loathe Microsoft and their products, which help me accomplish my goals the way a spoon helps me cut a steak, and I have never seen Gates as virtuous. So I am hardly unbiased.)

<@ElijahLynn> Trial balloon is the euphemism used in the Wiki article.

<@ElijahLynn> Fake it till you make it.

Oracle did the same.

<@rayiner> > despite being terrible at virtually everything it tries to do

Oh, MSFT ain't even "terrible" compared to some other players. Try Salesforce. Or ADP. Or even Atlassian. I can't believe we're actually paying money to use them and OMG, the software... I feel like when going to conferences, I'd be like that guy from the cigarettes ad in Idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzUcoZdfCOY ... "You work there? Fuck you!" :)

<@rayiner> > terrible at virtually everything it tries

Microsoft things I think are pretty OK and don't really mind using:

Xbox, especially Game Pass; Azure; BASIC (particularly classic Microsoft BASICs and SmallBASIC)

Microsoft things that I think are not completely terrible and sometimes kind of useful:

Hyper-V; WSL; VSCode; C# and .NET; Visual BASIC; Excel and PowerPoint

<@rayiner> I really don't like Microsoft products (notable exceptions include: F# and Age of Empires). But they are really good at getting companies to spend large amounts of money on their products. Slack is strictly better than Teams, however a company that already has Windows, Outlook, and Office really needs a good reason to spend $20/user (or whatever it is) for Slack over Teams. Azure I don't think is as good as AWS or GCP, however for a lot of business its we are already on Azure with Office 365 so why not?

<@rayiner> Imho it just speaks to importance of first mover advantage, land grab, and most importantly distribution distribution distribution.

It's not fake, it's reality. And things have always has been this way.

<@rayiner> I recently left a company that was spending $10million on SalesForce licenses that no one was apparently using. When the re-org happened, heads were rolled.

How common do you think that story is? Over paying for software that doesn't actually make users more productive?

<@rayiner> They are pretty good at making money at the end of the day, with ~100 billion/yr profits. Their P/E is only 30, which isn't outrageously overpriced.

What strikes you as fake?

<@rayiner> I don't think so, products are not the 100% of a business.

<@davidblue> Shipping highly optimized assembler for a program made to work on computers with 4KB RAM as a ~100 MB PDF is quite the flex.

I must admit that while it's computationally quite wasteful, the web page does look quite neat.

<@davidblue> You can’t even use reader mode on the site because of the text effect. It will cut off after the first few paragraphs since the others have the effect applied.

<@davidblue> Regardless of what anyone thinks of the website, it's likely that the only way the code exists is that ream of paper. While Bill Gates could easily have bought an OCR reader to make a text file of it with the loose change in his couch, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to just scan it in and provide that scan.

<@davidblue> The article rendering hurt my eyes, and then it was a pdf of the source code! :-(

<@billforsternz> I thought it was pretty neat and think they did a good job of creating that vibe. I have fond memories of that time and the computers and the electronics magazines.

As for the heaviness of the page… My 8 year old iPad loaded it just fine, so it couldn’t have been all that heavy.

<@billforsternz> The page design is distracting and making it hard to browse through. Pressing Page down/up key does not work! Such a design is not UX friendly.

I tried to view on a Windows 10 machine that's connected to a physical keyboard. In the scrolling on the mouse feels so laggy - you gotta wait for the animation to play before you can read.

I spent hardly a minute to read the top and then jumped back here to make this comment, which I never ever did before.

<@billforsternz> I had the same reaction to the site - but I could've been won over if there was a link to E1ite and C@@L basic source for the effects (at least the text effects which could've fit in 4k)

Steve Jobs quote: "The problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste."

But I actually would prefer the pre-XP windows desktop to the flattened UIs of Apple's today.

<@billforsternz> The animation is very reminiscent of Sneakers - wouldn't be surprised if that was the inspiration for it. It's a little distracting, but pretty cute imo.

<@billforsternz> But totally Microsoft, ain’t it? Elegance was never their thing.

<@billforsternz> So you had to be "that" guy. I think it looks pretty cool.

<@jonathanlydall> We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43586901.

<@jonathanlydall> [flagged]

<@winrid> I had never heard of this but it's description for it's git is what I hope and dream for anytime I go look at a project related to or having a GUI. reference at https://jdan.github.io/98.css/

<@switch007> It's like how you see blogs with "not my company's words" and comments online with disclaimers "I'm not a lawyer". They serve no purpose other than telling you that person has a misadjusted sense of risk.

<@switch007> > and cause every line you write to be subject to a lawsuit

See: Oracle v Google.

> Anyone else remember 2004

Remember John Ashcroft? The legal system was not as sophisticated then as it is now and juries were unlikely to penetrate even the basic issues of a case.

<@firefax> Since the site is an art project and not a site tuned for pure functionality.

<@whatever1> Have you tried emailing random people who appear in the Windows 3.1 development team credits page? Maybe Daniel Stenberg, he definitely wrote some of the code that goes into Windows!

<@breadwinner> > "...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

<@breadwinner> Gates and Allen wrote and copyrighted the first Microsoft Basic, and the Dec10 8080 emulator needed to run it (I've written one of these - a bit later as it happens).

Allen wrote a loader (in machine code) for it on an aircraft flying down to sell it to Altair.

What ever you might say about them, they were not dim.

<@breadwinner> When I look back at that era now I am amazed at how Gary Killdall failed to capitalize on his amazing position as the creator of CP/M, which was the dominant 8-bit OS and ran on numerous popular platforms, like the 8080, 8086, Z80, and the 68000. When IBM entered the PC market, Killdall and IBM could not come to an agreement so MS stepped in and licensed then purchased an imitation of CP/M called 86-DOS, which IBM offered in addition their own PC DOS. Killdall's company created an 8086 OS called CP/M-86 but it was more expensive than IBM's PC DOS and never took off. IBM did not want the liability of having contested code, so they let MS hold that bag and the rest is history.

<@breadwinner> I couldn't find the precise reference that mentions that they found the source code for the Basic interpreter and just "copied/ported" it. I did read they'd go "dumpster diving" to learn assembly. But not that they found and just ported the source code. Where is it?

<@breadwinner> Don't forget the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists that followed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists