3 ms·
That famous Gates letter is not inconsistent with the idea of large numbers of hobbyist programmers. He cared a lot about the piracy issue, but he was never tr
by fulladder 3y ago
That famous Gates letter is not inconsistent with the idea of large numbers of hobbyist programmers. He cared a lot about the piracy issue, but he was never trying to gate who was "allowed" to be a programmer.
Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter. It was all about bringing programming to the masses. Saying "to the people" implies some kind of empowerment, and I don't think that was ever quite as much a part of Microsoft's identity (although it was there in some form). "To the masses" is a better way to describe it in my opinion.
- WalterBright 3y agoIf you booted up an IBM PC without putting a boot disk in, it booted to a Microsoft BASIC prompt that was burned into the rom.
- fulladder 3y agoWe had an original IBM PC (not a clone, genuine IBM), and I actually don't recall it doing that. Maybe that was on some models and not others? The way I accessed BASIC was to boot up PC-DOS (IBM-branded version of MS-DOS) and then run some program that was like QBASIC although it might not have been called that yet. Later I switched to MS-DOS 3.21, and that came with real QBASIC. I also switched from BASIC to Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. Great times!
- WalterBright 3y agoYes, it was a genuine PC.
- ptman 3y agoGW-BASIC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC