Microsoft’s original source code

(www.gatesnotes.com)

617 points EvgeniyZh | 1 comments | 03 Apr 25 21:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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zabzonk ◴[04 Apr 25 00:17 UTC] No.43576999[source]▶

I've written an Intel 8080 emulator that was portable between Dec10/VAX/IBM VM CMS. That was easy - the 8080 can be done quite simply with a 256 value switch - I did mine in FORTRAN77.

Writing a BASIC interpreter, with floating point, is much harder. Gates, Allen and other collaborators BASIC was pretty damned good.

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teleforce ◴[04 Apr 25 10:02 UTC] No.43580146[source]▶

>>43576999 #

Fun facts, according to Jobs for some unknown reasons Wozniak refused to add floating point support to Apple Basic thus they had to license BASIC with floating point numbers from Microsoft [1].

[1] Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/bill-steve-jobs-remini...

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1. zozbot234 ◴[04 Apr 25 10:13 UTC] No.43580215[source]▶

>>43580146 #

Floating point math was a key feature on these early machines, since it opened up the "glorified desk calculator" use case. This was one use for them (along with gaming and use as a remote terminal) that did not require convenient data storage, which would've been a real challenge before disk drives became a standard. And the float implementation included in BASIC was the most common back in the day. (There are even some subtle differences between it and the modern IEEE variety that we'd be familiar with today.)

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