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The persistent rumors about billg ripping BASIC from a DECUS distribution seem to have finally died down.

flowerlad 6y ago
You mean this one? https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/ https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/
- tpmx 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC-PLUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC-PLUS > Microsoft BASIC was patterned very closely on BASIC-PLUS. [...] The ability to place logical and loop commands in-line, like I = I + 1 UNTIL I = 10 was not copied over and does not appear on any common version of microcomputer BASIC. MS BASIC also lacked the matrix commands.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  The article makes an intellectual stretch from dumpster diving and seeing listings for a 36 bit PDP-10 mainframe BASIC and then years later implementing a BASIC interpreter for the 8 bit Altair 8080. I seriously doubt you'd find any copyrighted commonality in the implementation.
sedachv 6y ago
I have not heard about that one. Here is some dirt about the origins of Micro-Soft BASIC from Noam Cohen's The Know-It Alls, which seems fairly well researched: > The timing of Gates's leave [from Harvard] could appear suspect since it came on the heels of a disciplinary hearing with college administrators. An auditor from the Defense Department discovered how much time Gates had spent programming on the PDP-10 computer, which was provided by the U.S. government, and began to ask questions. Gates's explanations were flimsy: first, he was doing work for his own company, and, second, some of that outside work was carried out by Allen, who wasn't a student. The records of the Gates disciplinary hearing are sealed, but accounts say that the punishment fell short of his being asked to leave… Gates, who as nineteen years old at the time, made his case in the club's newsletter, which published his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in the January-February 1976 issue… Furthermore, there was the computer time, whose "value" exceeded $40,000, Gates informed the hobbyists. This odd phrasing jumped out to some readers, even before people learned of Gates's reliance on Harvard's computers. Gates wasn't claiming that Micro-Soft had spent $40,000 for the computer time, which it needed to recoup; rather, it had obtained that time somehow. Young Gates certainly had chutzpah. He was writing to a bunch of excited young computer enthusiasts to object to the "theft" of a version of a program [BASIC] that was, to start, based on software created by academic researchers working on a federal grant and was created using "borrowed" time on a university computer that was also paid for by the federal government. p. 73

You mean this one? https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/ https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/

tpmx 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC-PLUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC-PLUS > Microsoft BASIC was patterned very closely on BASIC-PLUS. [...] The ability to place logical and loop commands in-line, like I = I + 1 UNTIL I = 10 was not copied over and does not appear on any common version of microcomputer BASIC. MS BASIC also lacked the matrix commands.
WalterBright 6y ago
The article makes an intellectual stretch from dumpster diving and seeing listings for a 36 bit PDP-10 mainframe BASIC and then years later implementing a BASIC interpreter for the 8 bit Altair 8080. I seriously doubt you'd find any copyrighted commonality in the implementation.

sedachv 6y ago

I have not heard about that one. Here is some dirt about the origins of Micro-Soft BASIC from Noam Cohen's The Know-It Alls, which seems fairly well researched: > The timing of Gates's leave [from Harvard] could appear suspect since it came on the heels of a disciplinary hearing with college administrators. An auditor from the Defense Department discovered how much time Gates had spent programming on the PDP-10 computer, which was provided by the U.S. government, and began to ask questions. Gates's explanations were flimsy: first, he was doing work for his own company, and, second, some of that outside work was carried out by Allen, who wasn't a student. The records of the Gates disciplinary hearing are sealed, but accounts say that the punishment fell short of his being asked to leave… Gates, who as nineteen years old at the time, made his case in the club's newsletter, which published his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in the January-February 1976 issue… Furthermore, there was the computer time, whose "value" exceeded $40,000, Gates informed the hobbyists. This odd phrasing jumped out to some readers, even before people learned of Gates's reliance on Harvard's computers. Gates wasn't claiming that Micro-Soft had spent $40,000 for the computer time, which it needed to recoup; rather, it had obtained that time somehow. Young Gates certainly had chutzpah. He was writing to a bunch of excited young computer enthusiasts to object to the "theft" of a version of a program [BASIC] that was, to start, based on software created by academic researchers working on a federal grant and was created using "borrowed" time on a university computer that was also paid for by the federal government. p. 73