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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

A fun side note: the core software that was included on the Model 100's ROM was written by Microsoft, and not just by Microsoft, but by Bill Gates himself. It was the last Microsoft project where he would write most of the code personally.

In a wide-ranging early '90s interview at the National Museum of American History, he reminisced about the Model 100, calling it "in a sense my favorite machine": https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm#tc35

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I played with a Model 100 for a while and wrote a version of Munching Squares in BASIC for it. What annoyed me about the built in BASIC was that it made NO concessions for the small, eight line screen. If you listed the program, it printed it, then printed a line with "OK" and then a blank line (possibly with a prompt, memory fails me), where the next command could be typed. Thus, 25% of the screen was wasted. It could have listed the program, with the last line at the very bottom of the screen and then waited for input before printing the "OK" and the prompt line. A nitpick, but it made it harder to program than was necessary.

Yes. OS was an acquisition of Microsoft, but Basic, P-CODE, visual basic and visual basic for applications were very central in Microsoft. It enabled to develop office very quickly.

All of the early PC's had a variant of GW Basic and Microsoft wrote those - they all even had the same memory leak.

You can tell an old school basic professional programmer from the Pet and Apple ][ Days by how they break out of Loops.

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