Very interesting historical anecdotes. The following shows his move to management: No, I don’t. I still help design algorithms and basic approaches, and someti

Very interesting historical anecdotes. The following shows his move to management: No, I don’t. I still help design algorithms and basic approaches, and sometimes I look at code. But since I worked on the IBM PC BASIC and the Model 100, I haven’t had a chance to actually create a program myself. The following shows pre-agile thinking on development: I like to think the whole program through at a design level before I sit down and write any of the code. And once I write the code, I like to go back and rewrite it entirely one time.The most important part of writing a program is designing the data structures. The second most important part is breaking the various code pieces down. Until you really get in there and write it out, you don’t have the keenest sense of what the common subroutines should be. The really great programs I’ve written have all been ones that I have thought about for a huge amount of time before I ever wrote them. I wrote a BASIC interpreter for a minicomputer in high school. I made massive mistakes in that program, and then I got to look at some other BASIC interpreters. So by the time I sat down to do Microsoft BASIC in 1975, it wasn’t a question of whether I could write the program, but rather a question of whether I could squeeze it into 4K and make it super fast. I was on edge the whole time thinking, “Will this thing be fast enough? Will somebody come along and do it faster?” It was a very different time!