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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

None of these guys are really all the accomplished as programmers though. Sure smart guys, but Microsoft bought DOS. Zuckerberg was far away from programming by the time that facebook was actually making money, and Musk didn't actually build any of the products he's famous for (Rockets, electric cars, or paypal).

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Gates was a pretty accomplished coder. He famously wrote the bootloader for his Basic interpreter by hand on the plane trip to Altair. Microsoft bought DOS out of expedience, not because they were incapable of developing it on their own.

Bill Gates also made some waves in the academic world when he came up with what was at the time the most efficient implementation of pancake sort [1]

[1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/papers/Bounds%20F...

Yeah, that was Paul Allen not Gates, and he wrote the bootloader on the plane. The interpreter was already finished.

Only full on Gates program I've ever heard of is Donkey.bas

Donkey.bas was most likely written as an educational exercise, although IBM ordered it. Microseft needed to show people how to code with their interpreters and compulers too, so Donkey.bas is not that sophisticated.

Gates was responsible for writing the first Altair Microsoft BASIC interpreter, except the bootloader, the software for the Kyotronic clones (designed in collaboration with Kay Nishi and licenced to Kyocera, Tandy and others).

Gates also had ample experience in programming minicomputers such as DEC PDP series together with Paul Allen.

You can read all about it in all the Bill Gates biographies out there.

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