Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by csl 412 days ago
An excellent article. Bill Gates himself posted a comment: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43#comment-1033
2 comments

Nice! From that comment:

"There were a lot of interesting versions of BASIC done for Japanese machines this article misses (..)"

Most likely referring to MSX-Basic. Which shows it's (c) Microsoft on the startup screen.

Not the fastest, but a very full-featured Basic compared to most Basics around @ the time. Iirc it does non-integer math on BCD coded values. Single & double precision, so users can decide RAM use/speed/precision tradeoffs.

Maybe there were other Japanese machines using MS-supplied Basics before that. But if so, likely few (any?) after MSX was introduced ('83), since that was big in Japan leaving little room for 8-bit competitors.

My very first computer was a Spectravideo MSX computer which I got in exchange for writing some demo programs for the midwest distributor for the company. Fun little machine, although I still preferred Apple in general.
What do you think his hn username is? :)
Actual billg would probably not have posted, er, teenwag.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6121.

(It was killed as spam but I've unkilled it now so it's visible to users who don't have 'showdead' turned on.)

My curiosity got the best of me. I checked archive.org to see what it was. A digg clone for celeb porn links? Was rightfully tagged as spam :)
If actual billg ever wants the account we'll be happy to recycle the username!