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by slededit 2797 days ago
He wrote his interpreter on a larger machine (PDP-11 I think), and tested it on an emulator they wrote. When they got to MITS to show off their code that was the first time it ever ran on real hardware.

They did not develop BASIC by flipping switches.
1 comments
a7776f88862 2794 days ago
It was a PDP-10 at Harvard, and it was not just Gates, it was Gates and Paul Allen working on it together. Another interesting thing is that the PDP-10 was being paid for by Department of Defense grants, and when an auditor discovered how much computer time Gates and Allen (who was not even affiliated with Harvard) had used up, there was a disciplinary hearing, after which Gates left Harvard.[1] In his "Open Letter to Hobbyists"[2] Gates claims they used $40,000 worth of computer time. So basically Microsoft started with $40,000 stolen from the government.

[1] This is documented by Noam Cohen in The Know-It Alls. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

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slededit 2794 days ago
BillG claims Paul did most of the emulator work and he worked on the interpreter core. With the floating point routines by Monte Davidoff who they hired. It was a team effort of course, but BillG was adamant to take credit for the interpreter specifically.

From the source code itself:

  PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF.
  BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF.
  MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE.
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774
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