Sabino Maggi
– Paul Allen sitting at the teletype connected to the school computer, with a very young Bill Gates standing next to him. Source: Celebrate 50 Years of Microsoft
Yesterday, despite the celebrations, I was a bit perfidious toward Microsoft. It must be said, though, that the celebratory piece written by Bill Gates for the 50th anniversary of his creature is beautiful. The text reveals nothing new, it’s all stuff well known to those who know a little about personal computing history, but the graphic realization is spectacular. Thanks to Bill for this beautiful gift!
But the real gem is the complete listing of the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, which was the first program ever sold by Micro-Soft (at first the name was hyphenated).
Guys, we can say what we want but the two of them, Paul Allen and Bill Gates (with the support of Monte Davidoff) wrote impeccable code. It is in Assembly, i.e., in the programming language as close to the machine as possible (unless one programs directly in binary code), which in those days was the only way to produce a compact program that weighed as little as possible on the very limited hardware resources of the machines of the time.
One does not need to know the Assembly language to appreciate the technical expertise of the two: their code is very clean and structured, full of subroutines (now better known as functions) to handle repetitive parts and avoid wasting space. In addition, all the code is full of comments, explaining in extreme detail how each section of code and even each individual line works.
I don’t mean that by reading it that one understands on the fly what it does (I wish he could!). But I’m pretty sure that if someone sufficiently knowledgeable about these things today had the patience to read the code, he (or she) could understand down to the smallest detail how the BASIC interpreter worked (who knows if in 50 years the same could be said for programs written today)
If you become the world’s biggest software producer, it is not just because you know how to sell and use questionable business practices. It is because you are good.