14 ms·

Microsoft’s original source code

• breadwinner 2y ago
  Microsoft got its start by Bill Gates doing some dumpster diving. Back then software wasn't seen as valuable thing, only hardware was. Source code wasn't something to be protected, 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. https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx
  • zabzonk 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      They were not dim, but Microsoft copied a lot, and didn't innovate. This aspect of Microsoft hasn't changed. In the 1990s, during the competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, compared Bill Gates to Ginger Rogers. This analogy suggested that, like Rogers, who danced everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels, Gates was adept at following and adapting competitors' innovations. This comparison was part of Sun's broader critique of Microsoft's business practices at the time. "It has been noted that everything Astaire did, Rogers was able to do -- backwards and in high heels. That's high praise for the nimble Ms. Rogers. But for a would-be visionary, following someone else's lead -- no matter how skillfully -- simply doesn't cut it." https://web.archive.org/web/19991013082222/www.sun.com/dot-com/realitycheck/headsup990813.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991013082222/www.sun.com/dot-c...
      • zabzonk 2y ago
        Yes, well Scott McNealy will never be my idea of a brilliant man. Or Sun of a particularly good company - where are they now? I remember one investment bank I worked for, starting: IT tech: Would you like a Sun workstation? Me: Nope, I would like a top of range Windows PC, with two or more screens. IT tech: Yeah, OK, all the traders say that too. We're throwing those Suns in the dumpster.
        • breadwinner 2y ago
          Sun made incredibly good hardware and software. They were incredibly good technologists, responsible for lots of innovations, but they were bad at business. So in that sense they were the opposite of Microsoft.
          • zabzonk 2y ago
            Some quite good hardware, I must admit - their servers were good. Workstations less so, and ludicrously expensive for what they were.
        • vlovich123 2y ago
          The spiritual successor for Sun machines is Oxide (lots of ex-Sun folks). And Sun got acquired by Oracle so it’s still technically around on the software side via virtual box and Java.
          • markus_zhang 2y ago
            I love Oxide's podcast. I checked its career page a few times but they are only hiring for field sales.
          • snovymgodym 2y ago
            That's the point though. What's left of Sun is basically a startup founded by a few ex-employees, some open-source software, and the rest of their IP being milked by Larry Ellison.
  • shmerl 2y ago
    Don't forget the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists that followed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
    • salgernon 2y ago
      One minor thing to consider is that hobbyists weren't distributing the source code (as posted in the OP) but trading the paper tape of the executable interpreter. They wanted the interpreter so they could write their own software that was probably unrelated to basic itself, that was just a means to an end. The industry pretty quickly moved to incorporate basic in rom on many platforms and microsoft was able to capitalize on that integration through licensing. I don't think his letter did much other than antagonize hobbyists - but they made a lot licensing to the hardware manufacturers later on (and the hardware was truly more valuable with basic on board. (One of my all time to this day favorite computers from that era is the TRS-80 Model 100. I don't remember if Microsoft provided the entire software stack for it, but I believe it was the last product that Bill Gates actually contributed to the software development.)
      • shmerl 2y ago
        Licensing programming tools was staple MS, since it also provided lock-in. The letter comes off as the complete opposite of open source approach to it.
      • themadturk 2y ago
        According to Gates, he wrote the Model 100's software himself. It was indeed his final major software project as a coder.
    • ThrowawayR2 2y ago
      And he won that argument. The steady movement away from Free Software licenses to shared source is because developers want to get paid by people using the code they created just as Gates describes in the letter. Even Bruce Perens is trying to hammer out a Post-Open Source license that's proprietary in all but name.
  • esafak 2y ago
    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.
  • ThrowawayR2 2y ago
    > "...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 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 https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx
    • breadwinner 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • ThrowawayR2 2y ago
        What part of that paragraph you quoted suggests that Microsoft BASIC wasn't original work?
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
      • sanswork 2y ago
        That's not what that says at all. It says that the language was slightly different depending on the platform. Microsoft basic wasn't the first basic interpreter which is a different claim than Microsoft basic source was copied from another interpreter.
      • pdw 2y ago
        That article is a bit confusing because it's using the term "BASIC" to refer to both the language and Microsoft's implementation. But what it's trying to say is that Microsoft's BASIC implementation was licensed by many computer companies (including Commodore and Atari) and that those companies changed and extended it in incompatible ways.
  • santiagobasulto 2y ago
    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?
    • dekhn 2y ago
      I think it comes from a misread of the text in the gates interview linked in the comment: "r. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, 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." My understanding is that they saw the source implementation for other BASICs (on mainframes or whatever they were called at the time) but their code is mostly their own. Few if any programmers spring fully-formed from the head of zeus (although paul allen was close) and plenty of valuable intellectual property was originally created elsewhere.
      • breadwinner 2y ago
        "The listings evidently included Basic for the PDP-10, but it was Allen who did the Assembler programming to simulate the Altair, while Gates, Monte Davidoff and later Allen worked on a Basic interpreter for the machine." See https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/ https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/
    • CamperBob2 2y ago
      "Just porting" is doing some seriously heavy lifting, if it's referring to porting something from a mainframe to one of the micros of the day.
• jer0me 2y ago
  The source code is linked at the end (warning: it's a 100 MB PDF). https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542cf683b/34d561c8-cf5c-4e69-af47-3782ea11482e/Original-Microsoft-Source-Code.pdf https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...
  • mysterydip 2y ago
    Ironic for something designed to take up only 4KB on its target machine :)
    • paulddraper 2y ago
      (It's a high-res image of the printed code.)
  • seabass-labrax 2y ago
    Thank you for the warning. I once used up my Internet package's entire monthly quota by following a similar link on Hacker News.
  • masfuerte 2y ago
    Nice one. Has anyone OCRed this back into text?
    • pronoiac 2y ago
      I attempted OCR with OCRmyPDF / Tesseract. It's not great, but it's under 1% the size, at least. https://github.com/pronoiac/altair-basic-source-code https://github.com/pronoiac/altair-basic-source-code
      • noname120 2y ago
        Maybe you should try something like EasyOCR instead: https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR
        • 2y ago
• starik36 2y ago
  The screenshot of the source code at the end of the article is a ton of printed code. How was it then entered into the Altair? Did someone have to retype it? Or was there media that predated floppies that was used?
  • richardwhiuk 2y ago
    Paul Allen entered it in front of the customer for the first run https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx I expect it was distributed on tape as well.
    • schlauerfox 2y ago
      "he’d forgotten to write the bootstrap loader" He didn't load the whole program from the switches on the face, just the bootstrap that would let them feed the paper tape through the teletype/paper tape reader that was common at the time. It would take a very very long time to load the whole program by hand. See this video of a demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxU_3dEJ2nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxU_3dEJ2nM
      • drcode 2y ago
        damn, that's a crazy process- thanks for the video link
  • ttkari 2y ago
    It was stored on a punched paper tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#Origin_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#Origin_and_develo...
  • ndiddy 2y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/TxU_3dEJ2nM?t=1013
• jwnin 2y ago
  Some luck, and willingness to take risks paid off in ways that could never be anticipated. Not sure I'll see something like the pc era in my lifetime. Perhaps mobile phones, or the Internet.
  • wrobelda 2y ago
    I mean… The AI?
    • Izikiel43 2y ago
      That came out of millions of dollars and man hours of investment by Google and OpenAi. VS Some college students selling software they didn't have and getting it ready from 0 to sellable in 2 months which led to a behemoth that still innovates to this day.
      • jonas21 2y ago
        It doesn't sound that different from Alex Krizhevsky training AlexNet on a pair of gaming GPUs in his bedroom, winning ImageNet, and launching the current wave of deep learning / AI.
        • Izikiel43 2y ago
          Great point, I was thinking more on the Transformer architecture, but I stand corrected. Google started similarly with PageRank as far as I remember.
          • musicale 2y ago
            Grad students, but yeah. CUDA was also basically invented by a grad student. Many undergrad examples as well in the web era, from Excite to Facebook to Snapchat. (Note the unanticipated consequences aren't always good.)
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
• billforsternz 2y ago
  There's something rather cringeworthy about the heavy and painful animations etc. on this website trying to create a 1970s computer technology vibe but instead just giving me a headache. I'd much prefer the same information, and the same vibe, with some much less fancy, lightweight easy to read web tech that actually simulates an authentic 1970s experience (I remember that era well! I'm an 8080 programmer myself from way way back).
  • salgernon 2y ago
    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.
    • noosphr 2y ago
      To be fair Jobs is dead so his ability to veto UI changes is limited.
      • ForOldHack 2y ago
        Bummer.
  • 725686 2y ago
    So you had to be "that" guy. I think it looks pretty cool.
    • JKCalhoun 2y ago
      This is HN. I would be surprised if that guy was not here. ;-)
      • mmooss 2y ago
        I think the guidelines actually say not to post comments criticizing the website layout, etc.
• stkai 2y ago
  The source code is such a fun read (for the comments). I found some source code for GW-BASIC, and here are two of my favorites: ;WE COULD NOT FIT THE NUMBER INTO THE BUFFER DESPITE OUR VALIENT ;EFFORTS WE MUST POP ALL THE CHARACTERS BACK OFF THE STACK AND ;POP OFF THE BEGINNING BUFFER PRINT LOCATION AND INPUT A "%" SIGN THERE ;CONSTANTS FOR THE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR FOLLOW ;DO NOT CHANGE THESE WITHOUT CONSULTING KNUTH VOL 2 ;CHAPTER 3 FIRST Edit: GW-BASIC, not QBASIC (https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC)
  • ndiddy 2y ago
    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 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774 and https://github.com/davidlinsley/DragonBasic https://github.com/davidlinsley/DragonBasic) but I believe this is the first public release of the original 8080 BASIC code.
  • deathtrader666 2y ago
    Shouldn't it be "valiant" ?
    • roryirvine 2y ago
      Sure, but in those days spellcheckers were separate apps - the most popular at the time being CorrectStar from MicroPro. They weren't integrated into programming-oriented editors, and it would have been unusual to run them against code.
      • 3836293648 2y ago
        I still haven't seen anyone using a spellchecker in code outside of IntelliJ
• santiagobasulto 2y ago
  Microsoft (and maybe even Bill Gates personally) generated a strong "dislike" sentiment to the hacker community. But we can't deny that he and Paul Allen were pure breed hackers and helped a lot the development of technology. Of course, we all prefer OSS and we'd pick Linus (or insert OSS dev name here) 100 times over one of the "evil capitalists"/s, but nevertheless they have to be recognized.
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • hall0ween 2y ago
      I don’t have an opinion on the issue, cause it’s outta my wheelhouse. Well, aside from civility, which you need to work on.
    • quickslowdown 2y ago
      This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM. I'm sure that helped its momentum in the corporate space, where it was already very present, but the whole family of Linux was very well established in servers, firewalls (more BSD than Linux here), mobile devices, embedded hardware, etc
      • skissane 2y ago
        > This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM. I’m not defending their overall argument, but I don’t think they are talking about the 2018 Red Hat acquisition, rather IBM’s 2000 announcement they were investing a billion dollars in Linux: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-to-spend-1-billion-on-linux-in-2001/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-to-spend-1-billi... IBM has been a big contributor to Linux long before buying Red Hat
    • executesorder66 2y ago
      Yeah, corporations have the resources to do that kind of investment in Linux which random hobbiests don't. But why do they do it in the first place, instead of investing in their own obviously supiriour massively invested in OS's? Because Linux IS better, and the whole idea of it is better than some closed source crap. By nature of the GPL license it will snowball and everyone else will be left behind.
• _7acn 2y ago
  [flagged]
• redwood 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • tombert 2y ago
    Do they still do EEE? I'm not a huge fan of MS but I haven't really heard of any EEE stuff in quite awhile.
    • actionfromafar 2y ago
      Most Linux development is corporate now, WSL makes Linux easy to "use" without ever leaving Windows, and the lock-in-effect if you are using Office/Azure/Teams/BI/etc is almost perfect. You can't leave it, basically. Easier to start a new subsidiary from scratch using something else, than trying to migrate off the Total Microsoft Stack.
      • tombert 2y ago
        Office has a port to Mac that is perfectly fine. Teams has a port to both Mac and Linux. Azure is a cloud service, but most of its development tools that I've used had Mac clients. I don't know anything about BI so I can't speak to that. Office even has a web version that generally works fine. I ran it on Brave browser in Linux last week. Teams browser also works fine, I use it to talk to my parents. I don't think your examples are good on this.
        • actionfromafar 2y ago
          The client almost doesn't matter anymore. The real lock is on the server side, at least if you are a company.
          • tombert 2y ago
            It feels like you shifted the goalpost, since you were initially complaining about WSL making it easier to stay within Windows. Even still, I don't even know that I agree with your updated point. I've imported docx files into Google Docs, LibreOffice, Pages, and OnlyOffice. There's varying levels of success, but generally they all work fine. It's really not that hard to migrate from Azure to other platforms. Even if I granted the lock-in here, I'd argue that it's different than the EEE thing that Microsoft is infamous for. I'm not a fan of vendor-lock-in either, but it's different than actively trying to kill standards.
• davidblue 2y ago
  Love how absolutely engorged and broken this web page is to dramatically depict a style that - were the article actually just published in plain text - would be what... a millionth the size? Should have known better than to be surprised that the "source code" one can "download" and "look through" is in a goddamned PDF. I do truly wonder if the fact that he was publishing a PDF as downloadable "code" even caused him any pause lol.
  • whydoyoucare 2y ago
    The article rendering hurt my eyes, and then it was a pdf of the source code! :-(
    • ks2048 2y ago
      If only Microsoft owned a place to post source code...
      • gerdesj 2y ago
        That would be either OneDrive or for the real l337 adminz: B:\ Git is for Linux and other cancers.
        • joezydeco 2y ago
          OneDrive? Look at mister corporate moneybags here. Sharepoint!
          • filoleg 2y ago
            SharePoint is where the real money and fun stuff is at. How do you think the likes of Delta and McDonalds manage their intranet and document storage? OneDrive is just a glorified SharePoint feature. P.S. Joking only partially, and not much at all.
            • joezydeco 2y ago
• zabzonk 2y ago
  I've written an Intel 8080 emulator that was portable between Dec10/VAX/IBM VM CMS. That was easy - the 8080 can be done quite simply with a 256 value switch - I did mine in FORTRAN77. Writing a BASIC interpreter, with floating point, is much harder. Gates, Allen and other collaborators BASIC was pretty damned good.
  • phkahler 2y ago
    I still have a cassette tape with Microsoft Basic for the Interact computer. It's got an 8080.
    • thesuitonym 2y ago
      You should upload the audio to the Internet Archive!
    • thijson 2y ago
      I remember my old Tandy Color Computer booting up and referencing Microsoft BASIC: https://tinyurl.com/2jttvjzk https://tinyurl.com/2jttvjzk The computer came with some pretty good books with example BASIC programs to type in.
    • vile_wretch 2y ago
      I have a MS Extended Basic cassette for the Sol-20, also 8080 based.
  • musicale 2y ago
    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".
  • TMWNN 2y ago
    >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.
• chipper2387 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Seanambers 2y ago
  Its written for people who know nothing about computers but most people who will read it knows loads.
• switch007 2y ago
  Guys, even reading this article could land you in jail!! Reading the code will forever taint your knowledge and cause every line you write to be subject to a lawsuit !! Stay safe !11 (Anyone else remember 2004, how scared everyone was when the Windows 2000 source was leaked?)
  • vasco 2y ago
    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.
  • timewizard 2y ago
    > 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.
• ChuckMcM 2y ago
  I would say, "Looking forward to the github repo with this code in ASCII" but I realize Microsoft would likely not allow that.
  • jen20 2y ago
    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 https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS
  • hypercube33 2y ago
    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.
  • pronoiac 2y ago
    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 https://github.com/pronoiac/altair-basic-source-code
• rayiner 2y ago
  The fact that Microsoft has a $2.77 trillion market cap despite being terrible at virtually everything it tries to do proves large swaths of the economy are fake.
  • wslh 2y ago
    I don't think so, products are not the 100% of a business.
  • kvirani 2y ago
    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.
  • azemetre 2y ago
    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?
  • musicale 2y ago
    > 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
  • iLemming 2y ago
    > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzUcoZdfCOY ... "You work there? Fuck you!" :)
  • 2y ago
• winrid 2y ago
  This website is the biggest missed opportunity to use win98.css ever
  • hypercube33 2y ago
    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/ https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
• azemetre 2y ago
  It's interesting reading this after finishing Palo Alto by Malcom Harris.
  • jgord 2y ago
    added to my must-read list. I notice his interview on Democracy Now : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jPzzjbVuk 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_Harris https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16872611.Malcolm_Harri...
    • jh00ker 2y ago
      Thanks for the Democracy Now interview! His description of "tech layoffs" is the most concise framing I've heard to describe what I've felt about it: "Cosmetic offering to the financial markets to show that Silicon Valley still can control its labor costs... It's less the future flow of funds is improved ... than that they're signaling something to the markets ..." https://youtu.be/j7jPzzjbVuk?si=YSbUW8h2mNktzj_9&t=634 https://youtu.be/j7jPzzjbVuk?si=YSbUW8h2mNktzj_9&t=634
• Barrin92 2y ago
  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. The code is worth reading and in addition to that they had a very solid business sense and pretty serious work ethic for people who were 20 years old. It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make it", "if it works you shipped too late" hustle culture that took hold of the industry, with entire products just being API wrappers. Really hope we see more companies that start out like Microsoft again.
  • mindwok 2y ago
    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.
    • cybrox 2y ago
      True but "fake it and then immediately proceed to make it" is definitely more appreciated than just burning through deals by lying for a long time, which "fake it till you make it" usually boils down to.
  • netsharc 2y ago
    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...
  • mmooss 2y ago
    > 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.
• whatever1 2y ago
  Cool Bill. But do you have what it takes to fix the onedrive shared folder bug that has been open for more than a year?
  • creatonez 2y ago
    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!
• froggertoaster 2y ago
  I met Bill Gates briefly a few years ago. Nice guy. Definitely buying his book.
• keepamovin 2y ago
  Damn this is cool. I think text is an underutilized medium for design.
• hulitu 2y ago
  > Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft Maybe vomit. So many days lost trying to use Windows, Office and other "apps"[1] from Mictosoft. [1] They were never able to write programs.
• srb24 2y ago
  i thought they started by writing traffic control software, where's that source code? :)
• gloosx 2y ago
  [flagged]
• nxpnsv 2y ago
  Nice design
• firefax 2y ago
  Why do I need to enable JS to view this website?
  • johannes1234321 2y ago
    Since the site is an art project and not a site tuned for pure functionality.
    • firefax 2y ago
      I've seen many an art project that eventually stops being updated and is used to serve up malware -- sometimes with a bonus expired or nonexistent cert. It should never be a requirement to enable JS to download a binary file like a PDF. If you're concerned about scraping, put in a robots dot txt and/or give it to an entity like Internet Archive to host.
      • johannes1234321 2y ago
        All nice and good, but Bill Gates decided he wants to have some fancy visual effects there. If you visit it with a JavaScript enabled graphicla browser (I haven't checked accisibility etc.) or read through some discussions here you will notice that functionality or such isn't purpose of the site. So yeah, for a company which wants to do business or something it isn't right, but that some retired dude doing something fun to him (of course he didn't implement it, but asked some agency)
• nilsbunger 2y ago
  Steve Jobs used to say the problem with Microsoft is they don’t have taste. The font-shimmering effect on scroll immediately reminded me of that, it is really distracting. And you can’t use reader mode to disable it. (FWIW, I’m a fan of Bill Gates and all he’s done for the world)
  • zelon88 2y ago
    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.
  • kevincox 2y ago
    FWIW the spinning scrolling effects of Apple release announcements are nearly as bad.
    • nilsbunger 2y ago
      Yeah, some of the Apple pages are pretty bad too, and I feel Jobs would've kept it more minimal. But to me, this blog is worse because it's supposed to showcase a whole article, and it's hard to read (and not even compatible with browser reader-mode).
  • graton 2y ago
    Personally I like it :) Tastes differ.
    • fsckboy 2y ago
      get your hands on DONKEY.BAS you will love it!
  • spookie 2y ago
    I think it's pretty cool
  • nerevarthelame 2y ago
    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.
• _fat_santa 2y ago
  Total sidenode but "Gates Notes" has to be one of the most exotic personal blogs I've ever seen. At this point would you even consider this a personal blog?
  • queuebert 2y ago
    Maybe Bill has really taken an interest in Javascript. /s
  • TheGRS 2y ago
    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.
• enigma101 2y ago
  pretty slick
• n0rdy 2y ago
  Flipping through the source code is like a time machine tour of tech's evolution over the past 50 years. It made me wonder: will our 2025 code look as ancient by 2075? And, btw, great infographics within the post.
  • Towaway69 2y ago
    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 ;)
    • bojan 2y ago
      > Has there ever been a moment in human history where we’ve (as a society, not as individuals) looked back and were envious? I am guessing that generation that transitioned from Pax Romana to early middle ages in Europe.
      • Towaway69 2y ago
        I doubt that since knowledge and education wasn’t wide spread - beyond cloisters, people didn’t general know how well the Romans had it. Remember it took until the Renaissance until ancient texts (Greek and Roman) were “rediscovered” by European scholars.
        • prewett 2y ago
          In all their cities they could see buildings that they did not know how to build. And before that, public services would have broken down. It would have become impossible to find people who knew how to repair your heated floor (if you were rich), etc. The city of Rome declined from 1 million people to something like 20,000. In the late 500s, Pope Gregory the Great thought that the world was ending because of all the trouble (including vicious barbarian invasions). Monks (and presumably anyone educated) had access to a lot of ancient texts, it was only some that got lost in the West. I think they would have had a distinct sense that that past was more advanced.
• amai 2y ago
  Source code published as PDF? Come on, this should be published on Github.
• ok123456 2y ago
  Gates pivoting back to being a "computer genius" reflects how badly his philanthropic reputation laundering operation is going.
• MrFurious 2y ago
  This website froze my phone, not joking.
  • RomanPushkin 2y ago
    Everything Bill touches gets frozen at some point of time...
  • ElijahLynn 2y ago
    Yeah, there's sort of a glitchy virus matrixy thing going on with the text as I scroll and it's really weird.
• ElijahLynn 2y ago
  What's compelling is that he basically starts off saying that they lied... to MITS.
  • djmips 2y ago
    Trial balloon is the euphemism used in the Wiki article.
  • prewett 2y ago
    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.)
  • sumedh 2y ago
    Fake it till you make it. Oracle did the same.
• djmips 2y ago
  A recent disassembly of, I think the same code. https://github.com/option8/Altair-BASIC/blob/master/BASIC%20disassembly-source.txt https://github.com/option8/Altair-BASIC/blob/master/BASIC%20... I checked in a few places at the start and towards the end (the sin function) and they matched.
• djmips 2y ago
  Note that the constants in the PDF are in Octal!
• jonathanlydall 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • kragen 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • jonathanlydall 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • Timwi 2y ago
        For what its worth, my reading of the text you're criticizing was not at all characterized by the level of distraction you describe; and this coming from somebody who is otherwise so distracted by typos that I will skip a comment (or blog post) that has more than a couple. Perhaps a level of familiarity with the convention plays a role, as I have chanced upon the Long Now Foundation and some of its writings. Despite, that was a long time ago. There are competing conventions such as writing the year 2000 as 102000 so as to reflect a common estimate of the origin of our species, which I encountered via kurzgesagt. I support the author’s rebuttal that if the slightly unusual year number prevents you from taking in the content and its points, you might just not be a member of the intended audience.
        • ninkendo 2y ago
          > you might just not be a member of the intended audience There’s no relationship between people who would appreciate the history the author was trying to communicate, and people who aren’t distracted by prefixing a pointless zero before the date. Unless you really meant that as a snide comment calling GP an idiot. Either way, maybe the zero prefixing thing is just stupid and not the hill to die on you seem to think it is.
      • kragen 2y ago
        [flagged]
• -__---____-ZXyw 2y ago
  Tried to open this page and the music I was streaming started to stutter so hard I just exed out. Is this a preposterously heavy page, or just very heavy?
• jlmcgraw 2y ago
  I wonder who the handwritten notes on page 98 are by? Starts with "confirm plane reservation on Tue. Sept 2 or Wed. Sept 3" which is correct for 1975
• PythonicIT 2y ago
  I'm not as smart as you guys but I figured that I'm going to try and write wine for life every single thing on GitHub unless someone has done it already so that we could try to compile and build this thing directly on our own computers.
• dr_dshiv 2y ago
  This is very LSD. I didn’t realize Bill was into it, until recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHY5i9-0tJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHY5i9-0tJM
• youheard 2y ago
  the design of this website is insane