From a comment in the source
> ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975
Wow! I did not realize that it was written so quickly. Two months that literally changed the PC landscape forever.
> ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975
Wow! I did not realize that it was written so quickly. Two months that literally changed the PC landscape forever.
It was on essentially ticker-tape, which was the medium at the time (wikipedia's photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#/media/File:Altai...)
Paul Allen was still "writing" it on the plane which in this case meant taking careful notes, cross-checking it very carefully and then manually punching holes into the paper. This is 1975, laptops are many years away.
It'd take about 30 minutes to load into the machine. Paul Allen claims they were the longest 30 minutes of his life. The MITS people were just smiling and waiting patiently, eager to see the cool software while Allen, on the other hand, had absolutely no idea whether it would work or not (they wrote it on an emulator after all).
After the 30 minutes it was ready to go and bam, everything worked. Bill and Paul had a company. Microcomputer software was now a thing.
Maybe I should do a computer history podcast ... I just checked and I don't really like most of them ... The video game crash of 1983 for example, I'd do at least 10 30 minute episodes on. The NES came out of it. I mean yeah, at least 10 episodes. I'll pick something super small (for example the HP 9100a) and see how it goes
Woz wrote Apple integer BASIC in the evenings while working at HP in just a few months. Guys were writing crazy stuff at the time. The original version of DOS that Microsoft bought to license to IBM for the PC was written in 6 weeks.
I feel often the need to remind programmers, that they don't write code for the computer. The computer will make it obvious, whether it understands you or not. You write for the poor sod tasked to maintain your code three years from now, when you're at your next gig.
Sure you can usually use import/aliasing to narrow it, but sometimes you just need to grab some random global from somewhere.
Is this actually true? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson
When a book appeared in 2004 claiming that 86-DOS was an unoriginal "rip-off" of CP/M,[6] Paterson sued the authors and publishers for defamation.[7][8] The judge found that Paterson failed to provide any evidence regarding "serious doubts" about the accuracy of the Gary Kildall chapter.
It wasn't a direct copying of the code, but the API was largely similar to CP/M.
(I started with 6800 / 6809 assembly language, and then Microsoft C 4.0).
Also: PDP-10 (TENEX) was awesome to use, was a very nice development platform.
It is interesting now to see Microsoft going back to its roots as a provider of developer tools for multiple platforms.
This is pop computing.
Gates and Allen had already been working on PDP-8 and Data General versions for a while.
I apologize for not taking current economic conditions into consideration with what was clearly a poorly-worded post.
(with stack overflow blocked)