Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

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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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