The legend is that Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote BASIC on a punchtape for the new Altair microcomputer while at Harvard, flew the punchtape to Albuquerque, an

The legend is that Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote BASIC on a punchtape for the new Altair microcomputer while at Harvard, flew the punchtape to Albuquerque, and had the BASiC running on the first day of debugging. They had written a CPU emulator on a Harvard computer and their BASIC on top of that. So the morale is you didnt need a lot of punchtape iterations if you did it carefully. Todays semi-compilation as you type in the code may contribute to a certain intellectual laziness. It easy to recompile hundreds of times during development.