On the eve of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, Bill Gates published the code that eventually led to the company’s success. The full sample is available for study.
«The coolest code I’ve ever written». With these words, Bill Gates represents publication in his blog post on Microsoft’s anniversary, looking back at how the company started. At the end of the post, Gates published the original code, which can download in PDF.
In January 1975 young Bill Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen read an article in Popular Electronics magazine about the Altair 8800 home computer from a small company called MITS.
«When Paul and I saw that cover, we knew two things: that the PC revolution was inevitable, and that we wanted to get in on the ground floor,» Gates recalls.
The plan was to create software that would allow Altair 8800 owners to develop their own programs using the easy-to-learn BASIC programming language. Gates and Allen decided to develop a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. It was supposed to convert BASIC commands into machine code that the Altair 8800 could understand. It was supposed to have a maximum size of 4 kilobytes so that Altair owners would have enough memory to run other programs.
First Microsoft software was created in two months. Since the enthusiasts did not have the Intel 8080 chip on which the Altair 8800 was based, Allen developed a simulator of it that ran on a Harvard PDP-10 mainframe. Bill Gates created the basic BASIC interpreter code, and another programmer, Monte Davidoff, was responsible for the math package code.
«It’s amazing to imagine how this piece of code led to half a century of innovation at Microsoft. Before there was Office, Windows 95, Xbox, or artificial intelligence, there was this code, and I still enjoy looking at it, even after all these years,», — Gates writes.
About two months later, they presented the BASIC interpreter to MITS, which licensed the software. Thus, Altair BASIC became the first product of the newly formed Micro-Soft company.
