Microsoft’s original source code

Microsoft got its start by Bill Gates doing some dumpster diving. Back then software wasn't seen as valuable thing, only hardware was. Source code wasn't something to be protected, so printouts of code would be thrown in trash. And that's where Bill Gates found the source code for Basic interpreter, which he ported and it became the first Microsoft product.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx

Gates and Allen wrote and copyrighted the first Microsoft Basic, and the Dec10 8080 emulator needed to run it (I've written one of these - a bit later as it happens).

Allen wrote a loader (in machine code) for it on an aircraft flying down to sell it to Altair.

What ever you might say about them, they were not dim.

Don't forget the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists that followed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

When I look back at that era now I am amazed at how Gary Killdall failed to capitalize on his amazing position as the creator of CP/M, which was the dominant 8-bit OS and ran on numerous popular platforms, like the 8080, 8086, Z80, and the 68000. When IBM entered the PC market, Killdall and IBM could not come to an agreement so MS stepped in and licensed then purchased an imitation of CP/M called 86-DOS, which IBM offered in addition their own PC DOS. Killdall's company created an 8086 OS called CP/M-86 but it was more expensive than IBM's PC DOS and never took off. IBM did not want the liability of having contested code, so they let MS hold that bag and the rest is history.

They were not dim, but Microsoft copied a lot, and didn't innovate. This aspect of Microsoft hasn't changed.

In the 1990s, during the competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, compared Bill Gates to Ginger Rogers. This analogy suggested that, like Rogers, who danced everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels, Gates was adept at following and adapting competitors' innovations. This comparison was part of Sun's broader critique of Microsoft's business practices at the time.

"It has been noted that everything Astaire did, Rogers was able to do -- backwards and in high heels. That's high praise for the nimble Ms. Rogers. But for a would-be visionary, following someone else's lead -- no matter how skillfully -- simply doesn't cut it."

https://web.archive.org/web/19991013082222/www.sun.com/dot-c...

> "...so printouts of code would be thrown in trash. And that's where Bill Gates found the source code for Basic interpreter, which he ported and it became the first Microsoft product"

Both sources you link to say Allen and Gates pulled listings of the PDP-10 operating system out (probably DEC's TOPS-10?) of the trash. BASIC is not an operating system. So your claim is debunked by your own sources.

"...digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

"...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..."

https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx

Yes, well Scott McNealy will never be my idea of a brilliant man. Or Sun of a particularly good company - where are they now?

I remember one investment bank I worked for, starting:

IT tech: Would you like a Sun workstation?

Me: Nope, I would like a top of range Windows PC, with two or more screens.

IT tech: Yeah, OK, all the traders say that too. We're throwing those Suns in the dumpster.

Seems that Ginger got the last laugh though.

I couldn't find the precise reference that mentions that they found the source code for the Basic interpreter and just "copied/ported" it. I did read they'd go "dumpster diving" to learn assembly. But not that they found and just ported the source code. Where is it?

Sun made incredibly good hardware and software. They were incredibly good technologists, responsible for lots of innovations, but they were bad at business. So in that sense they were the opposite of Microsoft.

I think it comes from a misread of the text in the gates interview linked in the comment:

"r. 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. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."

My understanding is that they saw the source implementation for other BASICs (on mainframes or whatever they were called at the time) but their code is mostly their own. Few if any programmers spring fully-formed from the head of zeus (although paul allen was close) and plenty of valuable intellectual property was originally created elsewhere.

"Just porting" is doing some seriously heavy lifting, if it's referring to porting something from a mainframe to one of the micros of the day.

The spiritual successor for Sun machines is Oxide (lots of ex-Sun folks). And Sun got acquired by Oracle so it’s still technically around on the software side via virtual box and Java.

Some quite good hardware, I must admit - their servers were good. Workstations less so, and ludicrously expensive for what they were.

Just yesterday I personally witnessed pallets of Sun/Oracle equipment being unloaded. I’ll admit, it made me nostalgic!

They’re still out there. Maybe not visible to normal folks, but I know for a fact until very recently the Chicago Mercantile Exchange used their hardware in great quantities— maybe even as the underlying hardware for their matching engines, though I admit this is conjecture on my part. They don’t exactly let exchange customers in those rooms!

I miss their 10k & 15k chassis. Solid kit for their day.

I love Oxide's podcast. I checked its career page a few times but they are only hiring for field sales.

What part of that paragraph you quoted suggests that Microsoft BASIC wasn't original work?

"The listings evidently included Basic for the PDP-10, but it was Allen who did the Assembler programming to simulate the Altair, while Gates, Monte Davidoff and later Allen worked on a Basic interpreter for the machine."

See https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/

And Apple stole a UI from Xerox Parc. Open AI stole everyone's content.

This is how the industry innovates

That's not what that says at all. It says that the language was slightly different depending on the platform.

Microsoft basic wasn't the first basic interpreter which is a different claim than Microsoft basic source was copied from another interpreter.

That article is a bit confusing because it's using the term "BASIC" to refer to both the language and Microsoft's implementation. But what it's trying to say is that Microsoft's BASIC implementation was licensed by many computer companies (including Commodore and Atari) and that those companies changed and extended it in incompatible ways.

Those were their own ports, as per the page you just linked. They developed Microsoft BASIC.

"The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer."

Now AIs are stealing from AIs.

That's the point though.

What's left of Sun is basically a startup founded by a few ex-employees, some open-source software, and the rest of their IP being milked by Larry Ellison.

None of us write programs from first principles, it's all based on code we've read before. If I was going to write a BASIC interpreter I'd read up on the basics of interpreters, literature which would include sample code, and look at other interpreters' code.

No matter where you think the code came from, the impact of Microsoft BASIC was huge, and they were first to the market.

BASIC was " BASIC, developed at Dartmouth College, was initially designed for and ran on a GE-225 mainframe computer paired with a Datanet-30 processor, which handled communications with Teletype terminals. " I got into the game on HP BASIC, also with teletype ASR-33s, I was only 9.

And I should of said (and did say) "With a Kingfisher X server installed and configured"

One minor thing to consider is that hobbyists weren't distributing the source code (as posted in the OP) but trading the paper tape of the executable interpreter. They wanted the interpreter so they could write their own software that was probably unrelated to basic itself, that was just a means to an end.

The industry pretty quickly moved to incorporate basic in rom on many platforms and microsoft was able to capitalize on that integration through licensing. I don't think his letter did much other than antagonize hobbyists - but they made a lot licensing to the hardware manufacturers later on (and the hardware was truly more valuable with basic on board.

(One of my all time to this day favorite computers from that era is the TRS-80 Model 100. I don't remember if Microsoft provided the entire software stack for it, but I believe it was the last product that Bill Gates actually contributed to the software development.)

Bill Gates did not write it by himself, Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff also worked on it. And they did not have a finished product after 8 weeks -- only a demo. The first commercial release was "version 2", half a year later.

Licensing programming tools was staple MS, since it also provided lock-in. The letter comes off as the complete opposite of open source approach to it.

How would Bill Gates copy source code from a 36-bit minicomputer with 32 kilowords (no byte addressing) of memory and a time-sharing operating system to a 8 bit microprocessor with a completely different instruction set and 4 kilobytes of memory and no operating system, just bare metal? Even if he and Allen had had the source code for BASIC-10, which you haven't provided evidence of, it would be closer to a reimplementation than a port.

And DEC was in Massachusetts, Bill Gates went to high school in Washington. That would be one hell of a road trip to dig into DEC's trash.

Podcast with Monte Davidoff

https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-113-monte-davidoff...

Starts after about the first 15 minutes.

And he won that argument. The steady movement away from Free Software licenses to shared source is because developers want to get paid by people using the code they created just as Gates describes in the letter. Even Bruce Perens is trying to hammer out a Post-Open Source license that's proprietary in all but name.

This is a myth. Jobs negotiated access to PARC technology as part of a deal in which Xerox bought shares in Apple at $10/share[0], selling about a year later at $22/share. Those shares would be worth around $5 billion today.

Xerox did later sue Apple for IP infringement, however most of their claims were dismissed[1].

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

[1] https://arlingtonmnnews.com/articles/bits-and-bytes/xerox-ve...

I think it was C-Cubed's trash, but it was DEC's IP. See: https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/

For his goals at the time, but not really in the long run. Open development ecosystems like Rust are way better thriving than any closed ones.

"This aspect of Microsoft hasn't changed." Now that is quite a dig, but I am going to have to completely agree, until they got Coulter but after that it is pretty much Microshaft.

> Xerox bought shares in Apple at $10/share[0], selling about a year later at $22/share.

> [0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

I searched the cite for the 'share', '10', '22', 'sold, 'sell', 'bought', 'buy', 'purchase', and found nothing. ?

Apologies, I was juggling multiple sources. The Xerox VC investment into Apple is a matter of public record, the figure of $10/share is widely quoted, including in the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs[0].

Exactly how and when Xerox disposed of its shares is not public record, but it's known to be around that timeframe and certainly Xerox made a profit. The book _Dealers of Lightning_ goes into more detail about the deal if you're interested[1].

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/why-your-computer-has-a-mous...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Light...

Neither SunOS or Solaris were open source, or based on open source.

I'm not talking about SunOS or Solaris. I'm talking about Java, dtrace, OpenZFS, and a various other random bits of Sun legacy still floating around in modern open-source systems.

Wasn't SunOS essentially a flavor or distro of Unix?

According to Gates, he wrote the Model 100's software himself. It was indeed his final major software project as a coder.