27 ms·

From a comment in the source > ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975 Wow! I did not realize that it was written so quickly. Two mo

From a comment in the source > ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975 Wow! I did not realize that it was written so quickly. Two months that literally changed the PC landscape forever.

copperx 6y ago
It's funny how stuff that got put together quickly like GW-BASIC and JavaScript got so much success because of luck and popular appeal. It's like music. The best music has never been in the top of the charts. The best movies have never won Oscars. This is pop computing.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Well, some of us think that acts like Kanye, Jay-Z, Amy Weinstein, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin were pretty great even though they had the crassness and audacity to make it to the top of the charts
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    Please don't mix Kanye and Jay-Z with Beatles and Led Zeppelin, they are in different leagues.
    - BoiledCabbage 6y ago
      Sounds like you don't know music.
- smacktoward 6y ago
  It wasn’t luck or popular appeal, it was like they say in real estate: “location, location, location.” JavaScript came bundled with every Web browser, and GW-BASIC came bundled with every IBM PC clone. A language that everybody in the world already has a copy of is going to get a lot of use, whether it’s good or not.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Not just IBM PC, but also hobbyist microcomputers. Few people could afford to have the real thing at home... but they could afford Spectrum or Commodore. And then those BASIC skills would readily translate to PC.
- sradman 6y ago
  I think they were riding a wave as it was beginning to form; the microprocessor wave. It was very much part of a place in time but they made some exceptional choices given that context. I don’t think that their success was due to luck or popular appeal, it was due to vision and the ability to execute on that vision.
bluedino 6y ago
Well...remember it is 'just' a BASIC interpreter. Woz wrote Apple integer BASIC in the evenings while working at HP in just a few months. Guys were writing crazy stuff at the time. The original version of DOS that Microsoft bought to license to IBM for the PC was written in 6 weeks.
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  I try to gauge the complexity of a task like this with a period view. On the one hand, BASIC was quite simple, and the 8-bit CPU had an instruction set that could be easily memorized (days before protected mode and 64 bytes worth of potential extended instruction decode prefixes!). On the other hand, debugging, code entry and documentation was sparse. (And there was no Stack Overflow.) So when I think to myself: How hard was this task compared to my for-fun projects? I really don't know what to think in today's inflationary terms. Thoughts?
- Tehdasi 6y ago
  Expectations of complexity were much less in those days. Like, a programming language that is limited to 40 character variable names would be considered amateur hour, but back in the day it was prolly considered luxuriant. Also given the memory constraints, it also limited the amount of complexity you could put in your code.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    More than luxuriant. Commodore BASIC (effectively 6502 Microsoft BASIC under license with tweaks) on the C64 only looked at the first two characters of variable names. It allowed them to be longer (don't remember how long), but would ignore subsequent letters.
    - guenthert 6y ago
      This is getting off-track, but while the pitfalls of two relevant characters out of potentially many are obvious and only excusable due to technical limitation of the platform, insisting on more than 40 relevant characters is likewise contraproductive. Who (which human) will readily distinguish two character strings more than 40 characters in length sharing the first 40? I feel often the need to remind programmers, that they don't write code for the computer. The computer will make it obvious, whether it understands you or not. You write for the poor sod tasked to maintain your code three years from now, when you're at your next gig.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
GW-BASIC was more of a reinterpretation of DEC's PDP-10 BASIC source code than a clean room reconstruction - ironic considering what happened next. Gates and Allen had already been working on PDP-8 and Data General versions for a while.
ken 6y ago
For one person working 8 hours a day, that's roughly one line of assembly language per minute. If you know assembly language, and you know the algorithms you're implementing, that doesn't seem especially fast.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  You find me someone who can code assembly for 8 hours a day continuously for two months and I'll hire them on the spot.
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    There are plenty that do, especially in embedded. I did assembly at Siemens half the day (the other half was C) when I worked for Siemens VDO in 2005-2006. It's not that hard, especially if you do simple stuff, opposed to high algorithms I usually implement these days in higher programming languages.
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    I've had jobs where that level of productivity would have gotten me fired for goldbricking. Gotta love the game industry...
  - ken 6y ago
    Is that a serious offer? It's been a couple years but I'm sure with a little practice I could get up to speed again, and (like half the country) I do happen to find myself out of a job right now.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      No, I was trying to make a point. Namely, that no one produces that kind of output consistently over time. I apologize for not taking current economic conditions into consideration with what was clearly a poorly-worded post.
- m463 6y ago
  how long would it take you to write a fast circle routine in assembler? (with stack overflow blocked)
jhallenworld 6y ago
Well this was way before the IBM PC.. Microsoft clearly had a plan in those days. They implemented all of the popular languages for microprocessors: Fortran-80, Cobol-80, Basic, PASCAL- but not C. They bought C from Lattice. (I started with 6800 / 6809 assembly language, and then Microsoft C 4.0). Also: PDP-10 (TENEX) was awesome to use, was a very nice development platform.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  The PC in the comment was referring to “personal computer” in the generic sense. It is interesting now to see Microsoft going back to its roots as a provider of developer tools for multiple platforms.
kristopolous 6y ago
Paul Allen flew down to New Mexico where MITS was without ever having tested Basic on a real Altair 8800. It was on essentially ticker-tape, which was the medium at the time (wikipedia's photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#/media/File:Altair_BASIC_Paper_Tape.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#/media/File:Altai...) Paul Allen was still "writing" it on the plane which in this case meant taking careful notes, cross-checking it very carefully and then manually punching holes into the paper. This is 1975, laptops are many years away. It'd take about 30 minutes to load into the machine. Paul Allen claims they were the longest 30 minutes of his life. The MITS people were just smiling and waiting patiently, eager to see the cool software while Allen, on the other hand, had absolutely no idea whether it would work or not (they wrote it on an emulator after all). After the 30 minutes it was ready to go and bam, everything worked. Bill and Paul had a company. Microcomputer software was now a thing. Maybe I should do a computer history podcast ... I just checked and I don't really like most of them ... The video game crash of 1983 for example, I'd do at least 10 30 minute episodes on. The NES came out of it. I mean yeah, at least 10 episodes. I'll pick something super small (for example the HP 9100a) and see how it goes
m463 6y ago
Think what you could do with a little time off and your own agenda to write something meaningful.

copperx 6y ago

It's funny how stuff that got put together quickly like GW-BASIC and JavaScript got so much success because of luck and popular appeal. It's like music. The best music has never been in the top of the charts. The best movies have never won Oscars. This is pop computing.

tomcam 6y ago
Well, some of us think that acts like Kanye, Jay-Z, Amy Weinstein, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin were pretty great even though they had the crassness and audacity to make it to the top of the charts
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Please don't mix Kanye and Jay-Z with Beatles and Led Zeppelin, they are in different leagues.
  - BoiledCabbage 6y ago
    Sounds like you don't know music.
smacktoward 6y ago
It wasn’t luck or popular appeal, it was like they say in real estate: “location, location, location.” JavaScript came bundled with every Web browser, and GW-BASIC came bundled with every IBM PC clone. A language that everybody in the world already has a copy of is going to get a lot of use, whether it’s good or not.
- int_19h 6y ago
  Not just IBM PC, but also hobbyist microcomputers. Few people could afford to have the real thing at home... but they could afford Spectrum or Commodore. And then those BASIC skills would readily translate to PC.
sradman 6y ago
I think they were riding a wave as it was beginning to form; the microprocessor wave. It was very much part of a place in time but they made some exceptional choices given that context. I don’t think that their success was due to luck or popular appeal, it was due to vision and the ability to execute on that vision.

bluedino 6y ago

Well...remember it is 'just' a BASIC interpreter. Woz wrote Apple integer BASIC in the evenings while working at HP in just a few months. Guys were writing crazy stuff at the time. The original version of DOS that Microsoft bought to license to IBM for the PC was written in 6 weeks.

staycoolboy 6y ago
I try to gauge the complexity of a task like this with a period view. On the one hand, BASIC was quite simple, and the 8-bit CPU had an instruction set that could be easily memorized (days before protected mode and 64 bytes worth of potential extended instruction decode prefixes!). On the other hand, debugging, code entry and documentation was sparse. (And there was no Stack Overflow.) So when I think to myself: How hard was this task compared to my for-fun projects? I really don't know what to think in today's inflationary terms. Thoughts?
Tehdasi 6y ago
Expectations of complexity were much less in those days. Like, a programming language that is limited to 40 character variable names would be considered amateur hour, but back in the day it was prolly considered luxuriant. Also given the memory constraints, it also limited the amount of complexity you could put in your code.
- vidarh 6y ago
  More than luxuriant. Commodore BASIC (effectively 6502 Microsoft BASIC under license with tweaks) on the C64 only looked at the first two characters of variable names. It allowed them to be longer (don't remember how long), but would ignore subsequent letters.
  - guenthert 6y ago
    This is getting off-track, but while the pitfalls of two relevant characters out of potentially many are obvious and only excusable due to technical limitation of the platform, insisting on more than 40 relevant characters is likewise contraproductive. Who (which human) will readily distinguish two character strings more than 40 characters in length sharing the first 40? I feel often the need to remind programmers, that they don't write code for the computer. The computer will make it obvious, whether it understands you or not. You write for the poor sod tasked to maintain your code three years from now, when you're at your next gig.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

GW-BASIC was more of a reinterpretation of DEC's PDP-10 BASIC source code than a clean room reconstruction - ironic considering what happened next. Gates and Allen had already been working on PDP-8 and Data General versions for a while.

ken 6y ago

For one person working 8 hours a day, that's roughly one line of assembly language per minute. If you know assembly language, and you know the algorithms you're implementing, that doesn't seem especially fast.

HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
You find me someone who can code assembly for 8 hours a day continuously for two months and I'll hire them on the spot.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  There are plenty that do, especially in embedded. I did assembly at Siemens half the day (the other half was C) when I worked for Siemens VDO in 2005-2006. It's not that hard, especially if you do simple stuff, opposed to high algorithms I usually implement these days in higher programming languages.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  I've had jobs where that level of productivity would have gotten me fired for goldbricking. Gotta love the game industry...
- ken 6y ago
  Is that a serious offer? It's been a couple years but I'm sure with a little practice I could get up to speed again, and (like half the country) I do happen to find myself out of a job right now.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    No, I was trying to make a point. Namely, that no one produces that kind of output consistently over time. I apologize for not taking current economic conditions into consideration with what was clearly a poorly-worded post.
m463 6y ago
how long would it take you to write a fast circle routine in assembler? (with stack overflow blocked)

jhallenworld 6y ago

Well this was way before the IBM PC.. Microsoft clearly had a plan in those days. They implemented all of the popular languages for microprocessors: Fortran-80, Cobol-80, Basic, PASCAL- but not C. They bought C from Lattice. (I started with 6800 / 6809 assembly language, and then Microsoft C 4.0). Also: PDP-10 (TENEX) was awesome to use, was a very nice development platform.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
The PC in the comment was referring to “personal computer” in the generic sense. It is interesting now to see Microsoft going back to its roots as a provider of developer tools for multiple platforms.

kristopolous 6y ago

Paul Allen flew down to New Mexico where MITS was without ever having tested Basic on a real Altair 8800. It was on essentially ticker-tape, which was the medium at the time (wikipedia's photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#/media/File:Altair_BASIC_Paper_Tape.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#/media/File:Altai...) Paul Allen was still "writing" it on the plane which in this case meant taking careful notes, cross-checking it very carefully and then manually punching holes into the paper. This is 1975, laptops are many years away. It'd take about 30 minutes to load into the machine. Paul Allen claims they were the longest 30 minutes of his life. The MITS people were just smiling and waiting patiently, eager to see the cool software while Allen, on the other hand, had absolutely no idea whether it would work or not (they wrote it on an emulator after all). After the 30 minutes it was ready to go and bam, everything worked. Bill and Paul had a company. Microcomputer software was now a thing. Maybe I should do a computer history podcast ... I just checked and I don't really like most of them ... The video game crash of 1983 for example, I'd do at least 10 30 minute episodes on. The NES came out of it. I mean yeah, at least 10 episodes. I'll pick something super small (for example the HP 9100a) and see how it goes

m463 6y ago

Think what you could do with a little time off and your own agenda to write something meaningful.