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Associated blog post from 2025:

Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's original Source code

https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code

(Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575884)

Gates plays the long game. The man dodged multiple requests over decades to publish this og code that launched MS as a company (pretended he had misplaced the same or forgot to reply or something): only to perfectly time it for a jubilee release.

I wonder were most of the comments added later? I guess they used pen and paper to write the ASM code and then enter it as machine code.

Why would anyone put themselves through that if they didn't have to? There is the tale of Allen hand coding the bootloader in machine code, but that was because he was on the plane to give a demo. Otherwise, all of the tales I've heard of the development of BASIC involved a mainframe. Hand coded assembly was certainly conceivable, given that terminals weren't exactly everywhere back in the day, but even a basic assembler does more than the straight translation of instructions into opcodes.

I imagine that was one of the happiest moments in his life (completing Altair BASIC).

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