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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

Credit should be given to Digital Equipment Corporation. Back then software isn't what companies made money on, it is hardware. Source code wasn't guarded as a secret as it is today, and you could find print outs in the dumpster [1]. Bill Gates and Paul Allen found the source code of DEC Basic [2] and ported it. (Wikipedia says Microsoft Basic was "inspired by" DEC's PDP-10 BASIC-PLUS.)

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-you-didnt-know-abo...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/software/2000/06/29/bill-gates-r...

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The Microsoft BASIC syntax is certainly inspired by DEC BASIC, but the actual implementation is completely different. DEC BASIC compiles the program source code into bytecode, while Microsoft BASIC tokenizes each line as it's entered and then interprets the tokens at runtime. You have to remember that minicomputers had vastly different capabilities from 8-bit microcomputers. Even if Gates did look at the code for DEC BASIC, there's not much there he could have used.

From [2]:

> Gates said: "I'd skip out on athletics and go down to this computer center. We were moving ahead very rapidly: Basic, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those."

Is there more context clarifying this means they studied the source code of DEC Basic?

In this [1] interview Gates says that he and his group got DEC BASIC source code and enhanced it.

[1] https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

"The BASIC they did which we got ahold of the BASIC source code and enhanced t quite a bit was great."

Thanks! I think this is still talking about his high school volunteer hacking rather than the MS Basic era. (i.e. doesn't obviously support your "ported it".)

They got the source code of DEC Basic, studied it, "enhanced quite a bit" then wrote their own Basic which is similar to DEC Basic, and you don't think it is a derivative? Ok. It is a derivative in my book.

It is derivative as in it uses the same ideas not as in it uses the same code. The latter would run afoul of copyright law but the former is perfectly fine.

You can make your own reincarnation anime even if you formerly worked making cels for TenSura.

GNU is not UNIX.

This is the second time I've seen this weird false claim on Hacker News that MS BASIC is a port of DEC BASIC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43576119.

From Paul Allen's site at https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx , it's said that the OS source code printouts is what they got out of the trash: "While his parents were concerned with his slipping grades, there was no slowing him down. He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system — an area Paul saw as the “Holy Grail” of software, which he knew he could use to unlock the machine’s potential. He was awestruck by the tightly written elegance on those printed pages."

That's completely false. Bill Gates has said [1] he got DEC's Basic source code and "enhanced it". So it is not limited to OS.

[1] https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

If you read the source the parent poster provides, it plainly says "...digging out the operating system listings from the trash..." not DEC BASIC. Same deceptive pattern as the previous account making false claims so there's something weird going on here.

What about this sentence don't you understand:

"The BASIC they did which we got ahold of the BASIC source code and enhanced t quite a bit was great."

That's a direct Bill Gates quote, see here: [1] https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

You're debunking your own claim. It says "enhanced it" presumably for running on the PDP-10. What it clearly does not say is ported or sold as MS BASIC.

You can use another word instead of "port". What is undeniable is that the Gates team looked at the DEC Basic source code, had extensive experience with it (having enhanced it), and the Basic they later made had functional similarities to DEC Basic. It is undeniable that DEC deserves some credit, as MS Basic is not a clean room implementation.

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