[HN Gopher] Microsoft's original source code
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft's original source code
Author : EvgeniyZh
Score : 504 points
Date : 2025-04-03 21:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gatesnotes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gatesnotes.com)
| breadwinner wrote:
| 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
| zabzonk wrote:
| 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.
| breadwinner wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| zabzonk wrote:
| 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.
| breadwinner wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Some quite good hardware, I must admit - their servers
| were good. Workstations less so, and ludicrously
| expensive for what they were.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I love Oxide's podcast. I checked its career page a few
| times but they are only hiring for field sales.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Neither SunOS or Solaris were open source, or based on
| open source.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| Wasn't SunOS essentially a flavor or distro of Unix?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| And I should of said (and did say) "With a Kingfisher X
| server installed and configured"
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Seems that Ginger got the last laugh though.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| "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.
| shmerl wrote:
| Don't forget the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists that
| followed:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
| salgernon wrote:
| 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.)
| shmerl wrote:
| 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.
| themadturk wrote:
| According to Gates, he wrote the Model 100's software
| himself. It was indeed his final major software project as
| a coder.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| 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.
| shmerl wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _...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
| outside1234 wrote:
| And Apple stole a UI from Xerox Parc. Open AI stole
| everyone's content.
|
| This _is_ how the industry innovates
| mycall wrote:
| Now AIs are stealing from AIs.
| exidy wrote:
| 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...
| mmooss wrote:
| > 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. ?
| exidy wrote:
| 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_o
| f_Light...
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| 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?
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| breadwinner wrote:
| "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/
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| "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.
| jer0me wrote:
| The source code is linked at the end (warning: it's a 100 MB
| PDF).
|
| https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...
| mysterydip wrote:
| Ironic for something designed to take up only 4KB on its target
| machine :)
| paulddraper wrote:
| (It's a high-res image of the printed code.)
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Thank you for the warning. I once used up my Internet package's
| entire monthly quota by following a similar link on Hacker
| News.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Nice one. Has anyone OCRed this back into text?
| pronoiac wrote:
| I attempted OCR with OCRmyPDF / Tesseract. It's not great,
| but it's under 1% the size, at least.
| https://github.com/pronoiac/altair-basic-source-code
| noname120 wrote:
| Maybe you should try something like EasyOCR instead:
| https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR
| pronoiac wrote:
| Feel free to run EasyOCR against it and submit a PR
| pdw wrote:
| The printout is dated 10-SEP-75 and is labeled "VERSION 3.0 --
| MORE FEATURES TO GO".
|
| Curiously this isn't the oldest extant version of the source
| code. The Harvard archives have a copy of version 1.1, printed
| on 30 April 75. http://altairbasic.org/other%20versions/ian.htm
| Aardwolf wrote:
| The printout also contains dates 6-SEP-64 below it, any idea
| what those are?
| starik36 wrote:
| The screenshot of the source code at the end of the article is a
| ton of printed code.
|
| How was it then entered into the Altair? Did someone have to
| retype it? Or was there media that predated floppies that was
| used?
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Paul Allen entered it in front of the customer for the first
| run
|
| https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx
|
| I expect it was distributed on tape as well.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| "he'd forgotten to write the bootstrap loader" He didn't load
| the whole program from the switches on the face, just the
| bootstrap that would let them feed the paper tape through the
| teletype/paper tape reader that was common at the time. It
| would take a very very long time to load the whole program by
| hand. See this video of a demo.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxU_3dEJ2nM
| drcode wrote:
| damn, that's a crazy process- thanks for the video link
| ttkari wrote:
| It was stored on a punched paper tape.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#Origin_and_develo...
| ndiddy wrote:
| It was distributed on paper tape. You needed a teletype with a
| paper tape reader to run it. Basically you would manually enter
| a bootloader using the switches on the Altair's front panel,
| and the bootloader would read BASIC off the tape and into RAM.
| If the checksum passed, it would then jump into BASIC. Here's a
| video of the process if you're interested:
| https://youtu.be/TxU_3dEJ2nM?t=1013
| jwnin wrote:
| Some luck, and willingness to take risks paid off in ways that
| could never be anticipated. Not sure I'll see something like the
| pc era in my lifetime. Perhaps mobile phones, or the Internet.
| wrobelda wrote:
| I mean... The AI?
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| That came out of millions of dollars and man hours of
| investment by Google and OpenAi.
|
| VS
|
| Some college students selling software they didn't have and
| getting it ready from 0 to sellable in 2 months which led to
| a behemoth that still innovates to this day.
| jonas21 wrote:
| It doesn't sound that different from Alex Krizhevsky
| training AlexNet on a pair of gaming GPUs in his bedroom,
| winning ImageNet, and launching the current wave of deep
| learning / AI.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Great point, I was thinking more on the Transformer
| architecture, but I stand corrected.
|
| Google started similarly with PageRank as far as I
| remember.
| musicale wrote:
| Grad students, but yeah. CUDA was also basically invented
| by a grad student.
|
| Many undergrad examples as well in the web era, from
| Excite to Facebook to Snapchat.
|
| (Note the unanticipated consequences aren't always good.)
| safety1st wrote:
| The big difference is that Bill's dad was one of the best
| corporate lawyers in America. Microsoft might not have
| amounted to much if they hadn't struck some
| extraordinarily prescient licensing deals at the right
| time and place.
| anovikov wrote:
| No difference really, just google who Bill Gates' mom was
| and how he got the IBM DOS deal... It wasn't BASIC that
| made MS big, it was DOS.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Consider that nobody ever sat in countless meetings asking
| "How can we use the PC?" They either saw the vision and went
| for it, or eventually ran up against the limitations of
| working without a PC and bought in.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Well, apparently, the guys in Xerox did sit in meetings not
| knowing what to do, until Steve Jobs visited PARC and saw
| what was possible.
| kragen wrote:
| Actually, there was about a 15-year period where many
| people didn't think PCs were good for anything, because
| they had access to much better (shared) computers. That's
| the context where http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bitty-
| box.html comes from. See also
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html#book8.
| Throughout the 01980s PC Magazine worked hard to convince
| business decisionmakers that IBM PCs weren't merely game
| machines; if you look at old issues you'll see that
| computer games were completely missing from the abundant
| advertisements in the magazine, presumably due to an
| explicit policy decision.
|
| I personally encountered people arguing that using PCs (as
| opposed to VAXen or mainframes) was a waste of time as late
| as 01992. And I actually even sort of joined them; although
| I'd been using PCs since before the IBM PC, once I got
| access to the internet in 01992, I pretty much stopped
| using PCs as anything but a terminal or a game machine for
| years, spending virtually 100% of my computer time on VMS
| or Ultrix. When I was using PCs again, it was because I
| could run BSD/386 and Linux on them, in 01994.
|
| (Maybe you'd assume from my own story of enthusiastic
| adoption that "nobody ever sat in countless meetings
| asking[,] "How can we use the internet?"', but if so, you'd
| be extremely wrong. In 01992 and even in 01994 there were
| _lots_ of people who thought the internet was useless or a
| fad. Bill Gates 's _The Road Ahead_ , published November
| 01995, barely mentioned the internet, instead treating it
| as a sort of failed experiment that would be supplanted by
| the Information Superhighway. Metcalfe predicted in 01996
| that it would collapse. David Isenberg was still arguing
| against "Bellheads" and their "Advanced Intelligent
| Network" in 01997: https://isen.com/stupid.html)
|
| It can be easy looking back in retrospect to oversimplify
| events like these with the benefit of hindsight, imagining
| that the things that seem obvious now were obvious then.
| But not only weren't they obvious--in many cases, they
| could have turned out differently. I think it was Alan Kay
| that argued that, without the invention of the sort of
| graphical user interface used by most non-cellphone
| personal computers today, the personal computer as we know
| it never would have become a mass-market phenomenon (though
| video game consoles were) and therefore Moore's Law would
| have stalled out decades ago. I'm not sure he was right,
| but it seems like a plausible alternate history to me.
|
| Of course, there were "killer apps" as early as VisiCalc
| for the Apple ][. Accountants and corporate executives were
| willing to read through the manual and take the time to
| learn how to use it, because it was such a powerful tool
| for what they were doing. But it was designed for
| specialists; it's not a UI that rewards casual use the way
| Excel or MacPaint or NCSA Mosaic is. Without the GUI, or if
| the GUI had come much later, plausibly personal computers
| would have remained a niche hobbyist thing for much longer,
| while somebody like Nintendo would have locked down the
| unwashed-masses platform--as we now see happening with
| Android. And (maybe this is obvious) that would have made
| it immensely less useful.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I offer this as constructive feedback, but I found your
| highly unusual style of adding a zero in front of all
| your years was very distracting while I was reading your
| comment, in a sense it "derailed my parsing" of what you
| were trying to say.
|
| Keep in mind that persevering with this style in your
| writing may mostly serve to detract from what you're
| actually trying to communicate to others.
| LeFantome wrote:
| The Internet?
| vessenes wrote:
| Having lived through pcs, internet, mobile, social, crypto and
| ai, I'd say mobile or social has been the biggest so far and AI
| is likely to be vastly larger impact. Of course they build on
| each other. But the global impact of mobile and social vastly
| exceed that of the pc era.
| billforsternz wrote:
| There's something rather cringeworthy about the heavy and painful
| animations etc. on this website trying to create a 1970s computer
| technology vibe but instead just giving me a headache. I'd much
| prefer the same information, and the same vibe, with some much
| less fancy, lightweight easy to read web tech that actually
| simulates an authentic 1970s experience (I remember that era
| well! I'm an 8080 programmer myself from way way back).
| salgernon wrote:
| I had the same reaction to the site - but I could've been won
| over if there was a link to E1ite and C@@L basic source for the
| effects (at least the text effects which could've fit in 4k)
|
| Steve Jobs quote: "The problem with Microsoft is that they just
| have no taste."
|
| But I actually would prefer the pre-XP windows desktop to the
| flattened UIs of Apple's today.
| noosphr wrote:
| To be fair Jobs is dead so his ability to veto UI changes is
| limited.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Bummer.
| 725686 wrote:
| So you had to be "that" guy. I think it looks pretty cool.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| This is HN. I would be surprised if that guy was not here.
| ;-)
| mmooss wrote:
| I think the guidelines actually say not to post comments
| criticizing the website layout, etc.
| criddell wrote:
| I thought it was pretty neat and think they did a good job of
| creating that vibe. I have fond memories of that time and the
| computers and the electronics magazines.
|
| As for the heaviness of the page... My 8 year old iPad loaded
| it just fine, so it couldn't have been all _that_ heavy.
| jmcgough wrote:
| The animation is very reminiscent of Sneakers - wouldn't be
| surprised if that was the inspiration for it. It's a little
| distracting, but pretty cute imo.
| ch13_ wrote:
| The page design is distracting and making it hard to browse
| through. Pressing Page down/up key does not work! Such a design
| is not UX friendly.
|
| I tried to view on a Windows 10 machine that's connected to a
| physical keyboard. In the scrolling on the mouse feels so laggy
| - you gotta wait for the animation to play before you can read.
|
| I spent hardly a minute to read the top and then jumped back
| here to make this comment, which I never ever did before.
| ilt wrote:
| But totally Microsoft, ain't it? Elegance was never their
| thing.
| stkai wrote:
| The source code is such a fun read (for the comments). I found
| some source code for GW-BASIC, and here are two of my favorites:
| ;WE COULD NOT FIT THE NUMBER INTO THE BUFFER DESPITE OUR VALIENT
| ;EFFORTS WE MUST POP ALL THE CHARACTERS BACK OFF THE STACK AND
| ;POP OFF THE BEGINNING BUFFER PRINT LOCATION AND INPUT A "%" SIGN
| THERE ;CONSTANTS FOR THE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR
| FOLLOW ;DO NOT CHANGE THESE WITHOUT CONSULTING KNUTH VOL 2
| ;CHAPTER 3 FIRST
|
| Edit: GW-BASIC, not QBASIC (https://github.com/microsoft/GW-
| BASIC)
| ndiddy wrote:
| Fun fact, GW-BASIC was a descendant of the original Altair
| BASIC. The "Translation created 10-Feb-83" headers on each
| source file refer to tooling Microsoft had that automatically
| translated the 8080 assembly to 8086 (it shouldn't be taken as
| a build date since they were manually modified after that
| point). Besides GW-BASIC, source code for the 6502 and 6809
| rewrites of Microsoft BASIC were available up to this point
| (see https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774 and
| https://github.com/davidlinsley/DragonBasic) but I believe this
| is the first public release of the original 8080 BASIC code.
| deathtrader666 wrote:
| Shouldn't it be "valiant" ?
| roryirvine wrote:
| Sure, but in those days spellcheckers were separate apps -
| the most popular at the time being CorrectStar from MicroPro.
|
| They weren't integrated into programming-oriented editors,
| and it would have been unusual to run them against code.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| I still haven't seen anyone using a spellchecker in code
| outside of IntelliJ
| timcobb wrote:
| Some people use VSCode extensions
| dhosek wrote:
| Emacs has the ability to do spellcheck inline, both as a
| run through the buffer (old-school style) and as an as-
| you-type live feature. That said, I do most of my coding
| in JetBrains IDEs these days.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| cSpell alone has 13 million installs
|
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stree
| tsi...
| StanAngeloff wrote:
| I recently found https://github.com/tekumara/typos-lsp
| that uses https://github.com/crate-ci/typos Plenty of GH
| stars so likely a solid user base. Works great in NeoVim
| with the built-in apellchecker.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Eclipse has had an integrated spell-checker, which I
| believe is on by default for most file types, for like
| approximately forever. Now maybe everybody turns it off,
| but I gotta imagine there are _some_ people who like it
| and keep it on.
| freedomben wrote:
| For Vim/Neovim users, there is one built in that is
| pretty good, and once you've added frequent custom words
| to the dictionary it is great. You can turn it on with
| `:set spell` or off with `:set nospell`. Add custom words
| by pressing `zg` on the target word:
|
| I have this in my vimrc file so it's on by default for
| certain file types: " Turn on
| spellcheck for certain filetypes and word completion.
| " words can be added to the dict by pressing 'zg' with
| cursor on word.
| autocmd Filetype markdown setlocal spell
| autocmd Filetype gitcommit setlocal spell
| set complete+=kspell
| " Don't highlight in red an underscore (_) in markdown
| " https://vi.stackexchange.com/q/18471/17441
| autocmd Filetype markdown syn match markdownIgnore
| "\v\w_\w"
|
| Custom additions to the dictionary will go to a simple
| text file (one word per line) in
| `~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add` (depending on your settings)
| where it is easy to edit or backup.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The best programmers I've known have all been deficient at
| spelling. I don't know why it so uniformly appears among
| them.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| A popular t-shirt illustrates this point:
|
| https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/637761-i-write-code-
| progra...
| themadturk wrote:
| Humans in general, even writers, are deficient at spelling.
| This is the reason we need spellcheckers.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| Microsoft (and maybe even Bill Gates personally) generated a
| strong "dislike" sentiment to the hacker community. But we can't
| deny that he and Paul Allen were pure breed hackers and helped a
| lot the development of technology. Of course, we all prefer OSS
| and we'd pick Linus (or insert OSS dev name here) 100 times over
| one of the "evil capitalists"/s, but nevertheless they have to be
| recognized.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Meh, I don't prefer OSS. I prefer tools that work well,
| whatever they may be. For a long time, that was Windows.
| Microsoft went to hell, so now it's Linux. I'll happily use
| commercial solutions so long as they're good.
| muppetman wrote:
| Yup! Which is why I use Linux but you better believe I've got
| Sublime Text installed (and licensed!)
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| In "In the Beginning was the Command Line" Neal Stephenson
| used a car analogy to describe consumer operating systems, I
| always thought his analogy was pretty apt:
|
| To paraphrase him a little bit:
|
| Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap
| and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network
| of dealerships with mechanics on staff.
|
| Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station
| wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are
| expensive.
|
| Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers
| organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from
| sophisticated space aged materials.
|
| The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the
| biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever
| looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch
| of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get
| angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station
| wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't
| you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Allen wrote an 8080 emulator on a time shared PDP-10 in order
| for Gates to write the assembly code that implemented a BASIC
| interpreter - complete with I/O and editor - for a sight-unseen
| system, all in 4 kilobytes. And it worked the first time it was
| run.
|
| I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all
| that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays).
|
| Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies
| them as pure breed hackers to me.
| Seanambers wrote:
| As a kid of the late 90s i feel like it was kinda unfair.
|
| Back in the day (70s(?)80s) computers shipped with the
| programming language manual. All I got was a CDROM of ENCARTA
| and a slip to mail in for a restore set of MS DOS / WIN 3.1
| diskettes(which was sorely needed I might add).
| russellbeattie wrote:
| In the mid 70s you got a badly mimeographed copy of the
| schematics and a bag of parts.
|
| In the late 70s to early 80s you got a programming manual,
| but you had to save your programs on cassette tapes.
|
| In the late 80s, you got glossy manuals which showed you
| how to turn on the computer, hook up a printer and load a
| program from DOS.
|
| In the early 90s, the manuals were plain paper, smaller,
| and had instructions on how to use a mouse, and explained
| what a window is. Plus the mail-ins.
|
| Mid-90s (CD-ROM "multimedia machines") you got a sheet of
| paper which told you to load the interactive tutorial from
| the included CD.
|
| Late 90s you got 5000 hours of AOL. Plus another CD filled
| with co-branded crapware like CorelDraw Lite for Dell.
|
| 2000s+ crapware pre-installed, driver CD and a warranty
| card.
|
| So really, the time period with the included programming
| manual was just a few years. And mostly all you did is
| print Hello World over and over again on the screen. So
| don't be too jealous.
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| Yeah. At least you got a good MSDN CD in 1999 with tons
| of example code and all the info you'd want on Windows.
|
| Now we get: {{ Fill in the Description }}
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/powershell/module/storageb...
| adrian_b wrote:
| Good programming manuals that were delivered with the
| computers and with the compilers/interpreters have
| existed about for the entire time when MS-DOS was
| dominant, i.e. from the launch of IBM PC in 1981, which
| always had things like a commented BIOS listing, which
| was very instructive, and detailed documentation of all
| its hardware peripherals, until the mid nineties, i.e.
| until Windows 95.
|
| Until the early nineties, the compilers and interpreters
| from companies like Borland and Microsoft came with big
| excellent programming manuals demonstrating how to use
| them.
|
| Also any complex commercial application for MS-DOS, e.g.
| AutoCAD, Lotus 1-2-3, the BRIEF editor for programmers
| etc., would have voluminous manuals, including sections
| on how to write scripts in whatever embedded scripting
| language they were using.
|
| Only for the users of pirated copies of MS-DOS, compilers
| etc., the access to manuals was more difficult and some
| of them may have even not been aware of what manuals were
| normally available for the legitimate owners. Most IBM PC
| clones also did not have much documentation delivered
| with them. Since they were made to be compatible with
| IBM, it was supposed that anyone who needs them will buy
| the original IBM manuals.
|
| Since Windows 95, the vendors of hardware PC peripherals
| have stopped providing documentation for them, providing
| closed-source Windows device drivers instead, but before
| that, whenever I was buying some PC add-on card, it
| typically came with a manual providing enough information
| about control registers etc., that I was able to write an
| MS-DOS device driver myself, if necessary.
| musicale wrote:
| I wish Microsoft would bring back Encarta!!
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Microsoft Dinosaurs was also awesome
| linguae wrote:
| I'm a 90s kid (born in 1989), and I remember the days of the
| anti-trust lawsuit, "Internet Exploder," the Slashdot Borg
| icon, and resentment from Mac users, WordPerfect users,
| Netscape users, and others who strongly disliked the Microsoft
| monopoly.
|
| Still, there's something about Microsoft of that era. Bill
| Gates was "one of us," a passionate nerd. This was an era where
| nerds like Jobs, Woz, and Gates ruled. The 1990s and the 2000s
| felt exciting, and it felt like technology was making the world
| a better place.
|
| I must admit, even though I was firmly in the Jobs and Woz camp
| in the 2000s, I also fondly remember Windows 2000, Visual
| Studio 6, and pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. Contrary to Steve
| Jobs' opinion, I believe Microsoft has occasionally exhibited
| great taste :). For better or for worse, the 1990s was peak
| Microsoft.
|
| Something happened in the 2010s. It seems like the tech
| industry has become just like any other industry that has
| gotten entrenched, and today's tech leaders simply don't
| inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today's
| Web media companies are far scarier than 1990's Microsoft ever
| was.
|
| Then again, I was a mere child in the 1990s, and I became an
| adult in the 2010s, and so I could be looking at the 1990s
| through childhood memories.
| accurrent wrote:
| As a fellow 90s kid... I feel the same. I remember when Sony
| Ericson launched their first camera phone and how we used to
| go through PC upgrades like crazy. My dad would go to the
| bookstore to buy magazines with new linux distros included
| for free. Now I have laptop thats 4 years old and Im not
| excited to buy my next (heck I dont even need to buy my
| next... I can run LLama.cpp just fine on my current).
|
| I do think the barrier to entry in tech has significantly
| increased. There was a wave of internet companies like Uber,
| (and their global equivalents) that benefited massively from
| providing local internet services. In the 2000s and 2010s the
| tech companies benefited massively from global poverty
| alleviation efforts to get users in remote regions on line.
| The push to get people online meant that millions of people
| in poor countries had access to social media and ads but not
| basic needs like toilets. As the tech companies saturated the
| emerging markets, covid began to hit. The stark inequalities
| began to be rubbed in. The big tech companies also dont
| really have any real material asset to fight over anymore.
| Their markets have been largely captured. As a big tech firm
| the game is now to maintain your lead. The industry is now
| run by MBAs, not hackers anymore.
| miohtama wrote:
| Now those poor people are online globally and can scroll
| Instagram.
| feketegy wrote:
| I think what you are remembering is just nostalgia, people
| tend to remember the good things and shut out the bad ones.
|
| I still remember how Microsoft, under Gates, acted like a
| robber baron to the whole tech community. You had a nice
| product? It was instantly copied by Microsoft, and they
| pulled the rug under you because they could.
|
| You wanted open standards? It was a war purely because
| Microsoft wanted it to be. It was either Microsoft's way or
| the highway.
|
| I consider pre-2008 and pre-iPhone launch to be the peak of
| the Internet, but it's all downhill from that year onwards.
| Gud wrote:
| Yes, agree. Bill Gates was never "one of us". He came from
| extreme privilege and used his advantage to kill off much
| more innovative technologies. BeOS, anyone?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There's a throwaway quote about the school Gates was
| attending spending a few thousand dollars a year on a
| terminal and computer time.
|
| The inflation factor is around 5X, so that's maybe $15k
| to $20k in modern money.
|
| There were _very_ few schools in the world with a five
| figure budget for computer experiments for a handful of
| pupils in the early 1970s.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| and?
| mmooss wrote:
| To be fair, much of the coding community is highly
| educated - especially in the top companies, which
| generally hire from top schools - and therefore likely to
| be privileged.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >It seems like the tech industry has become just like any
| other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today's tech
| leaders simply don't inspire me like how the leaders of
| previous eras did. Today's Web media companies are far
| scarier than 1990's Microsoft ever was.
|
| Three letters: MBA
|
| When the MBA's came into the tech industry everything got
| stale, 'safe' and unexciting as they want to leech their
| fucking hands over everything in the name of maximal profit.
|
| Private Equity follows MBAs so you see more PE firms getting
| into tech during the same period. Same story, fucking leeches
| leeching makes the leeches happy at the expense of society.
| In fact, it seems PE firms and MBA grads love making the
| world an actively terrible place
|
| I hate business bros. They ruin god damn everything.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Gates showed his true colors right up front with the "Open
| Letter to Hobbyists", and pursued the rest of his career in
| like fashion. It's not just about Microsoft versus open source:
| many of us already resented their strong-arming, dominance-
| oriented, rent-seeking, ownership-hungry monopolistic approach
| to computing before the free software movement had really
| gotten going, or the term "open source" had even been invented.
| azemetre wrote:
| It is interesting, especially in the context of Gates
| childhood upbringing and his extremely rare access to
| computers and computer training.
|
| Something that maybe one or two other dozen children had
| access to in the entire country during that time (60s/70s).
|
| You have to also remember that computers were also seen as a
| public good for a large swath of users during this time too.
|
| Makes you wonder how different this industry would be if we
| replaced Bill Gates singular childhood privilege with that of
| Bill Joy's (which looks like your typical middle class
| experience)? Only instead of one child, you could probably
| help thousands of children.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Berkeley's Willard Jr high school bussed 7th grade student
| s up to Lawrence hall of science in the fall of 1970. I was
| the 3rd grade younger brother that started to print all the
| code, so I could walk through it. There were at least 70 to
| 80 kids there, and only two years later, they added two
| more 30 person labs. Dartmouth BASIC and HP basic were at
| most universities. While punched card FORTRAN was as most
| engineering schools.
| azemetre wrote:
| Yes, you're talking about getting access via public
| education. Bill Gates, as a child, had nearly 24/7
| personal access to these machines.
|
| Something most professionals didn't even have.
| BeetleB wrote:
| This is consistent with the parent comment. You can have a
| hacker mindset and be totally against open source. They are
| orthogonal qualities.
| mmooss wrote:
| > You can have a hacker mindset and be totally against open
| source. They are orthogonal qualities.
|
| You can write that, but I don't see it. FOSS is built for
| hacking, designed to empower and enable hacking.
| Proprietary closed-source software prevents it.
| mmooss wrote:
| How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially
| proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read,
| they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like
| looking back with rose-colored glasses.
|
| My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from
| marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal,
| not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with
| any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. They took over the
| office productivity software market by illegally leveraging
| their Windows monopoly. Their initial and core success -
| getting DOS on IBM PCs, which led to the Windows monopoly - was
| simply leaping at a business opportunity, I think even before
| they began developing the product.
|
| Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS,
| or something like that, even though it ran fine? Do you mind
| that they tried to destroy and monopolize the open web (thank
| you Mozilla!)?
| pjmlp wrote:
| And then all the folks that used to write M$ served the open
| Web in a plate to Google, now with the exception of Safari,
| what we have is ChromeOS, in browser, and being packaged in
| "native" apps.
| einr wrote:
| _My understanding of Microsoft 's success was it came from
| marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to
| illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare
| Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example._
|
| So it's 1992, and OS/2 _still_ isn 't happening.
|
| But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a
| 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple
| megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1
| for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer
| things.
|
| If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you
| can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz
| 68000, a single floppy drive, _no hard drive,_ and a 1-bit
| black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot
| fewer computer things, much more slowly.
|
| Macs were _very expensive._ Windows was _good enough._ It
| wasn 't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto
| the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of
| Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit".
| Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging
| mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that
| worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady
| stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have
| sold like hotcakes either way.
|
| _Didn 't they generate fake errors for Windows running on
| DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?_
|
| IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final
| build.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections
| to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then
| forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows.
|
| That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet
| Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust
| suit happened.
|
| Meanwhile IE and Windows were _notorious_ for being
| terrible pieces of software.
|
| Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far
| behind even the most basic standards of professional
| reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple,
| 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became
| almost reliable.
|
| Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.
|
| Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted
| countless person-centuries for its users.
|
| The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for
| PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the
| awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which
| created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++
| classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good
| number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.
|
| For context, PCs at this time were also extremely
| expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain
| damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or
| more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just
| starting to become available.
| wvenable wrote:
| > Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone
|
| At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection --
| Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at
| regular intervals.
|
| IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than
| Netscape.
|
| I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and
| it was p0wned in 5 minutes.
|
| That's just the way things were.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| > Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being
| terrible pieces of software.
|
| My feeling of IE3 to IE6 (at its release time) is that
| (anti-competitive strategies aside), many (most?) average
| consumers would very likely choose IE over Netscape if
| they gave both a bit of a test drive.
|
| In 1996 (maybe 1997) I was 14/15 at the time and remember
| coming to the conclusion that IE3 ran much faster on
| Windows 95 compared to Netscape.
|
| It being (anticompetitively) free helped, but on the
| 100Mhz Pentiums with 8MB of RAM in our computer lab,
| you'd be a masochist to choose Netscape over it for
| random web browsing.
|
| IE4 was quite resource intensive, but because MS
| anticompetitively pre-loaded it on OS startup, it still
| started faster than Netscape.
|
| IE6 I found pleasant to use and it wasn't until Firefox
| came out with tabs (Opera had them earlier, but you would
| often encounter websites it wouldn't render properly,
| probably due to IE targeted design), that IE lost its
| sheen for me.
|
| Firefox was popular enough that developers started caring
| about standards compliant websites at which point IE
| started entering the "despised" category, but it may not
| have actually been displaced from its top spot were it
| not for Chrome.
| mmooss wrote:
| > IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the
| final build.
|
| I've never heard that and IIRC, DR-DOS's owners sued
| successfully (or DoJ sued successfully). People certainly
| saw the errors.
| timewizard wrote:
| BASIC was written as a team in Albuquerque. Altair had good
| reason to support their efforts. They then purchased DOS from
| Seattle Computer Products after they made a deal with IBM to
| sell it. To be fair Xerox gave away the office suite and the
| hardware to anyone who asked.
| themadturk wrote:
| BASIC was written as a team in Bellevue. Altair did nothing
| to support them until they traveled to Albuquerque and
| proved the code worked.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| This also how I read the story, they were 'basically'
| salesmen/marketing guys with good investor storytime. The
| hacking part was hacking together code on the plane before
| the meeting to rake in the cash?
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Simply untrue. They were hacking in highschool for fun.
| Complete nerds. They were _also_ ruthless business people.
| mmooss wrote:
| Most high school hackers and nerds don't become good
| professional coders.
| lou1306 wrote:
| > Was Gates especially proficient with code?
|
| Well the article is obviously a biased source, but surely
| developing a) an ALTAIR emulator for PDP-10s (Allen) and b) a
| pretty much full-fledged BASIC interpreter that was
| exclusively tested on top of said emulator (Gates) in two
| months, in the 70s was not the kind of stuff an average coder
| would have done.
| dboreham wrote:
| Gates was obviously a proficient coder. I think you're
| experiencing a time compression phenomenon here: this was the
| mid 70s. Microsoft the big bad Microsoft that everyone knows
| about didn't appear until around the mid 90s. 20 years later,
| although from the perspective of 2025 those two eras seem
| pretty much adjacent.
| mmooss wrote:
| I don't mean proficient, I mean elite, exceptional,
| legendary.
| wvenable wrote:
| > This really seems like looking back with rose-colored
| glasses.
|
| It works both ways. It's hard to look back at the time while
| ignoring all the paths the road has taken since then.
|
| Microsoft has always been company that is very good at
| building software compared their competition at the time.
| Their office productivity software, for example, is what made
| Windows popular (Windows is useless without apps). It's easy
| to give more weight to their flaws because, in many ways,
| their successes just seem obvious now.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Microsoft has always been company that is very good at
| building software compared their competition at the time.
|
| I have never, ever heard that. (Edit: Name such software
| today.)
|
| > Their office productivity software, for example, is what
| made Windows popular (Windows is useless without apps).
|
| Completely false. Windows was already a monopoly, and the
| US government successfully sued Microsoft for using their
| Windows monopoly to leverage sales for Office. They told
| manufacturers: If you want Windows (which was essential)
| for the computer, you must pay for an Office license too.
|
| Where do you get this stuff or why are you posting it?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| It's also kind of difficult to hate on a guy that devoted his
| remaining decades to literally saving tens of thousands of
| lives around the world.
| devsda wrote:
| Its possible. He is following the same tactics as when he was
| head of MS [1].
|
| 1. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-
| bi...
| executesorder66 wrote:
| It's very easy to hate on him for that very reason. He's just
| buying a good reputation for the fraction of his wealth that
| is completely insignificant.
|
| If I could buy that kind of reputation by tossing a few coins
| into the void, why not? Especially after I've stolen billions
| from others.
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| Yes, it's called pulling the ladder up behind you. I don't
| think "he was a hacker" mitigates anything whatsoever.
| mmooss wrote:
| The pure breed hacker just published source code in a 100 MB
| PDF.
| davidblue wrote:
| Love how absolutely engorged and broken this web page is to
| dramatically depict a style that - were the article actually just
| published in plain text - would be what... a millionth the size?
| Should have known better than to be surprised that the "source
| code" one can "download" and "look through" is in a goddamned
| PDF.
|
| I do truly wonder if the fact that he was publishing a PDF as
| downloadable "code" even caused him any pause lol.
| whydoyoucare wrote:
| The article rendering hurt my eyes, and then it was a pdf of
| the source code! :-(
| ks2048 wrote:
| If only Microsoft owned a place to post source code...
| gerdesj wrote:
| That would be either OneDrive or for the real l337 adminz:
| B:\
|
| Git is for Linux and other cancers.
| joezydeco wrote:
| OneDrive? Look at mister corporate moneybags here.
| Sharepoint!
| filoleg wrote:
| SharePoint is where the real money and fun stuff is at.
|
| How do you think the likes of Delta and McDonalds manage
| their intranet and document storage? OneDrive is just a
| glorified SharePoint feature.
|
| P.S. Joking only partially, and not much at all.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty awesome, right?
|
| REAL windows enterprise companies worth their salt use a
| shared drive on \\\global.
| nailer wrote:
| You can't even use reader mode on the site because of the text
| effect. It will cut off after the first few paragraphs since
| the others have the effect applied.
| timClicks wrote:
| Shipping highly optimized assembler for a program made to work
| on computers with 4KB RAM as a ~100 MB PDF is quite the flex.
|
| I must admit that while it's computationally quite wasteful,
| the web page does look quite neat.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Regardless of what anyone thinks of the website, it's likely
| that the only way the code exists is that ream of paper. While
| Bill Gates could easily have bought an OCR reader to make a
| text file of it with the loose change in his couch, I don't
| think it's entirely unreasonable to just scan it in and provide
| that scan.
| zabzonk wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| I still have a cassette tape with Microsoft Basic for the
| Interact computer. It's got an 8080.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| You should upload the audio to the Internet Archive!
| thijson wrote:
| I remember my old Tandy Color Computer booting up and
| referencing Microsoft BASIC:
|
| https://tinyurl.com/2jttvjzk
|
| The computer came with some pretty good books with example
| BASIC programs to type in.
| vile_wretch wrote:
| I have a MS Extended Basic cassette for the Sol-20, also 8080
| based.
| musicale wrote:
| I agree - it's a useful BASIC that can do math and fits in 4 or
| 8 kilobytes of memory.
|
| And Bill Gates complaining about pirating $150 Altair BASIC
| inspired the creation of Tiny BASIC, as well as the coining of
| "copyleft".
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Writing a BASIC interpreter, with floating point, is much
| harder. Gates, Allen and other collaborators BASIC was pretty
| damned good.
|
| The floating point routines are Monte Davidoff's work. But yes,
| Gates and Allen writing Altair BASIC on the Harvard PDP-10
| without ever actually seeing a real Altair, then having it work
| on the first try after laboriously entering it with toggle
| switches at MITS in Albuquerque, was a remarkable achievement.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Allen had to write the loader in machine code, which was
| toggled in on the Altair console. The BASIC interpreter
| itself was loaded from paper tape via the loader and a tape
| reader. The first BASIC program Allen ran on the Altair was
| apparently "2 + 2", which worked - i.e. it printed "4" I'd
| like to have such confidence in my own code, particularly the
| I/O, which must have been tricky to emulate on the Dec10.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > which must have been tricky to emulate on the Dec10
|
| I don't see why it would be tricky. I don't know how
| Allen's 8080 emulator on the PDP-10 worked, but it seems
| straightforward to emulate 8080 I/O.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Well, I found it a bit hard on my Dec10-based emulator. I
| never got the memory-mapped stuff to work properly - I
| just mocked up some of the I/O instructions. But it was
| actually a spare-time project, intended to let my
| students do stuff like sorting, searching in strings, so
| I didn't feel too guilty. It had an assembler, debugger
| and other stuff. And it was portable - completely
| standard FORTRAN77!
| WalterBright wrote:
| What Allen did was write an 8080 emulator that ran on the
| -10. The 8080 is a simple CPU, so writing an emulator for it
| isn't hard.
|
| https://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html
|
| Then, their BASIC was debugged by running it on the emulator.
|
| The genius was not the difficulty of doing that, it wasn't
| hard. The genius was the idea of writing an 8080 emulator.
| Wozniak, in comparison, wrote Apple code all by hand in
| assembler and then hand-assembled it to binary, a very
| tedious and error-prone method.
|
| In the same time period, I worked at Aph, and we were
| developing code that ran on the 6800 and other
| microprocessors. We used full-fledged macro assemblers
| running on the PDP-11 to assemble the code into binary, and
| then download binary into an EPROM which was then inserted
| into the computer and run. Having a professional macro
| assembler and text editors on the -11 was an enormous
| productivity boost, with far fewer errors. (Dan O'Dowd wrote
| those assemblers.)
|
| (I'm doing something similar with my efforts to write an
| AArch64 code generator. First I wrote a disassembler for it,
| testing it by generating AArch64 code via gcc, disassembling
| that with objdump and then comparing the results with my
| disassmbler. This helps enormously in verifying that the
| correct binary is being generated. Since there are thousands
| of instructions in the AArch64, this is a much scaled up
| version of the 8080.)
| dhosek wrote:
| The Wozniak method was how I used to write 6502 assembler
| programs in high school since I didn't have the money to
| buy a proper assembler. I wrote everything out longhand on
| graph paper in three columns. Addresses on the left, a
| space for the code in the middle and the assembler opcodes
| on the right, then I'd go through and fill in all the hex
| codes for what I'd written. When you work like that, it
| really focuses the mind because there's not much margin for
| error and making a big change in logic requires a _lot_ of
| manual effort.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| I started Z80 assemnbler (on a ZX80 computer) that way.
| But I soon get fed up looking up opcodes and especially
| calculating relative jumps (especially backwards ones) by
| hand as I often seemed to make off by one errors causing
| my program to crash.
|
| So I wrote my on assembler in BASIC :)
| teleforce wrote:
| 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...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Writing a floating point emulator (I've done it) is not too
| hard. First, write it in a high level language, and debug the
| algorithm. Then hand-assembling it is not hard.
|
| What is hard is skipping the high level language step, and
| trying to do it in assembler in one step.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I've never understood floating point :-)
| WalterBright wrote:
| The specs for it are indeed hard to read. But the
| implementation isn't that bad. Things like the sticky bit
| and the guard bit are actually pretty simple.
|
| However, crafting an algorithm that uses IEEE arithmetic
| and avoids the limitations of IEEE is hard.
| hh2222 wrote:
| Wrote floating point routines in assembler back in
| college. When you get it, it's one of those aha moments.
| codedokode wrote:
| Let's say we want to store numbers in computer memory but
| we are not allowed to use decimal point or any characters
| except for digits. We need to make some system to encode
| and decode real numbers as a sequence containing only
| digits.
|
| With fixed point numbers, you write the digits into the
| memory and have a convention that the decimal point is
| always after N-th digit. For example, if we agree that
| the point is always after 2-nd digit then a string 000123
| is interpreted as 00.0123 and 123000 means 1230. Using
| this system with 6 digits we can represent numbers from 0
| to 9999 to precision of 0.01.
|
| With floating point, you write both decimal point
| position (which we call "exponent") and digits (called
| "mantissa"). Let's agree that the first two digits are
| the exponent (point position) and the rest four is
| mantissa. Then this number: 020123
|
| means 01.23 or 1.23 (exponent is 2 meaning the decimal
| point is after 2nd digit in mantissa). Now using same 6
| digits we can represent numbers from 0 to 9999*1096 with
| relative precision of 1/10000.
|
| That's all you need to know, and the rest should be easy
| to figure out.
| WalterBright wrote:
| In other words, a floating point number consists of 2
| numbers and a sign bit:
|
| 1. the digits
|
| 2. the exponent
|
| 3. a sign bit
|
| If you're familiar with scientific notation, yes, it's
| the same thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation
|
| The rest is just the inevitable consequences of that.
| codedokode wrote:
| I like "decimal point position" more than "exponent".
| Also, if I remember correctly, "mantissa" is the
| significand (the digits of the number).
|
| And by the way engineering notation (where exponent must
| divide by 3) is so much better. I hate converting things
| like 2.234*1011 into billions in my head.
|
| And by the way (unrelated to floating point)
| mathematicians could make better names for things, for
| example instead of "numerator" and "denominator" they
| could use "upper" and "lower number". So much easier!
| djmips wrote:
| Fixed point is where the number has a predetermined
| number of bits for the integer and fraction like 8.8
| where you have 0-255 for the integer and the fraction
| goes from 1/256 to 255/256 in steps of 1/256
|
| Floating point at it's simplest just makes that a
| variable. So the (.) position is stored as a separate
| number. Now instead of being fixed - it floats around.
|
| This way you can put more in the integer or more in the
| fraction.
|
| The Microsoft Basic here used 23 bits for the number, 1
| sign bit and 8 bits to say where the floating point
| should be placed.
|
| Of course in practice you have to deal with a lot of
| details depending on how robust you want your system.
| This Basic was not as robost as modern IEEE754 but it did
| the job.
|
| Reading more about IEE754 is a fascinating way to learn
| about modern floating point. I also recommend Bruce
| Dawson's observations on his Random ASCII blog.
| kragen wrote:
| Also, though, how big was Apple Integer BASIC? As I
| understand it, you had an entire PDP-10 at your disposal
| when you wrote the Fortran version of Empire.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I did learn how to program on the -10. A marvelous
| experience.
|
| Looking backwards, writing an integer basic is a trivial
| exercise. But back in the 70s, I had no idea how to write
| such a thing.
|
| Around 1978, Hal Finney (yes, that guy) wrote an integer
| basic for the Mattel Intellivision (with its wacky 10 bit
| microprocessor) that fit in a 2K EPROM. Of course, Hal
| was (a lot) smarter than the average bear.
| Seanambers wrote:
| Its written for people who know nothing about computers but most
| people who will read it knows loads.
| switch007 wrote:
| Guys, even reading this article could land you in jail!! Reading
| the code will forever taint your knowledge and cause every line
| you write to be subject to a lawsuit !! Stay safe !11
|
| (Anyone else remember 2004, how scared everyone was when the
| Windows 2000 source was leaked?)
| vasco wrote:
| It's like how you see blogs with "not my company's words" and
| comments online with disclaimers "I'm not a lawyer". They serve
| no purpose other than telling you that person has a misadjusted
| sense of risk.
| timewizard wrote:
| > and cause every line you write to be subject to a lawsuit
|
| See: Oracle v Google.
|
| > Anyone else remember 2004
|
| Remember John Ashcroft? The legal system was not as
| sophisticated then as it is now and juries were unlikely to
| penetrate even the basic issues of a case.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I would say, "Looking forward to the github repo with this code
| in ASCII" but I realize Microsoft would likely not allow that.
| jen20 wrote:
| Why would they not allow it? They've published the source to
| numerous old products (including MS-DOS[1]), and they own
| GitHub...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Funny enough last night I was hoping more old 90s Microsoft
| code got open sourced and I somehow was living under a rock.
| Maybe one day I'll get to legally dig through NT 3.51 code.
| especially since it was ported to MIPS and Power iirc. I went
| on a huge tangent reading about how someone ported leaked ntvdm
| code to x64. They didn't provide code and I didn't go hunting
| for the leaked stuff and won't...but I think it's super neat
| how forward portable some of the stuff NT has is.
| pronoiac wrote:
| I attempted OCR, and while it's not great, it's a start. I
| considered adding a reference to "software wants to be free!"
| or the Open Letter, but I'm winding down for the night.
| https://github.com/pronoiac/altair-basic-source-code
| rayiner wrote:
| The fact that Microsoft has a $2.77 trillion market cap despite
| being terrible at virtually everything it tries to do proves
| large swaths of the economy are fake.
| wslh wrote:
| I don't think so, products are not the 100% of a business.
| kvirani wrote:
| Imho it just speaks to importance of first mover advantage,
| land grab, and most importantly distribution distribution
| distribution.
|
| It's not fake, it's reality. And things have always has been
| this way.
| azemetre wrote:
| I recently left a company that was spending $10million on
| SalesForce licenses that no one was apparently using. When the
| re-org happened, heads were rolled.
|
| How common do you think that story is? Over paying for software
| that doesn't actually make users more productive?
| musicale wrote:
| > terrible at virtually everything it tries
|
| Microsoft things I think are pretty OK and don't really mind
| using:
|
| Xbox, especially Game Pass; Azure; BASIC (particularly classic
| Microsoft BASICs and SmallBASIC)
|
| Microsoft things that I think are not completely terrible and
| sometimes kind of useful:
|
| Hyper-V; WSL; VSCode; C# and .NET; Visual BASIC; Excel and
| PowerPoint
| iLemming wrote:
| > despite being terrible at virtually everything it tries to do
|
| Oh, MSFT ain't even "terrible" compared to some other players.
| Try Salesforce. Or ADP. Or even Atlassian. I can't believe
| we're actually paying money to use them and OMG, the
| software... I feel like when going to conferences, I'd be like
| that guy from the cigarettes ad in Idiocracy
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzUcoZdfCOY ... "You work
| there? Fuck you!" :)
| ecshafer wrote:
| I really don't like Microsoft products (notable exceptions
| include: F# and Age of Empires). But they are really good at
| getting companies to spend large amounts of money on their
| products. Slack is strictly better than Teams, however a
| company that already has Windows, Outlook, and Office really
| needs a good reason to spend $20/user (or whatever it is) for
| Slack over Teams. Azure I don't think is as good as AWS or GCP,
| however for a lot of business its we are already on Azure with
| Office 365 so why not?
| musicale wrote:
| > F# and Age of Empires
|
| ;-) I have never disliked MS games, or Xbox, or Game Pass.
|
| I also dislike Teams, but Microsoft has integration, which
| means that it works with Outlook's calendar, with Office
| documents, etc. It's mediocre but full-featured.
|
| I wonder what would have happened if Google Docs had evolved
| into a credible MS Office competitor? It's also amazing that
| Skype (and Hangouts/Meet for that matter) had such a head
| start over Zoom.
| wslh wrote:
| Google Docs is a competitor, but that doesn't necessarily
| mean it can take significant market share from Microsoft,
| especially among customers deeply embedded in the Microsoft
| ecosystem.
|
| The reverse is also true: companies that are heavily
| invested in Google Workspace, GCP, and related tools are
| unlikely to switch to Office 365.
|
| That said, there are exceptions. Legal professionals, for
| instance, often require the standard: Microsoft Word. And
| for advanced tasks, Google Sheets falls short of what Excel
| can do.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| They are pretty good at making money at the end of the day,
| with ~100 billion/yr profits. Their P/E is only 30, which isn't
| outrageously overpriced.
|
| What strikes you as fake?
| winrid wrote:
| This website is the biggest missed opportunity to use win98.css
| ever
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I had never heard of this but it's description for it's git is
| what I hope and dream for anytime I go look at a project
| related to or having a GUI. reference at
| https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
| azemetre wrote:
| It's interesting reading this after finishing Palo Alto by Malcom
| Harris.
| jgord wrote:
| added to my must-read list.
|
| I notice his interview on Democracy Now :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jPzzjbVuk
|
| This guys mental map is impressive, as are the color of his
| book titles :
| https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16872611.Malcolm_Harri...
| jh00ker wrote:
| Thanks for the Democracy Now interview! His description of
| "tech layoffs" is the most concise framing I've heard to
| describe what I've felt about it:
|
| "Cosmetic offering to the financial markets to show that
| Silicon Valley still can control its labor costs... It's less
| the future flow of funds is improved ... than that they're
| signaling something to the markets ..."
|
| https://youtu.be/j7jPzzjbVuk?si=YSbUW8h2mNktzj_9&t=634
| Barrin92 wrote:
| What stands out to me about Gates and Allen is the serious
| technical chops. Writing an emulator for the PDP-10 and then an
| interpreter, line editor, I/O system all in 4KB of memory. The
| code is worth reading and in addition to that they had a very
| solid business sense and pretty serious work ethic for people who
| were 20 years old.
|
| It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make
| it", "if it works you shipped too late" hustle culture that took
| hold of the industry, with entire products just being API
| wrappers. Really hope we see more companies that start out like
| Microsoft again.
| mindwok wrote:
| To be fair they definitely faked it, they said they had source
| code for a program they hadn't even written yet! They were just
| also very serious about the "making it" part.
| cybrox wrote:
| True but "fake it and then immediately proceed to make it" is
| definitely more appreciated than just burning through deals
| by lying for a long time, which "fake it till you make it"
| usually boils down to.
| netsharc wrote:
| IMO although it was complex, the human brain could still manage
| the complexity back then. Reading Woz's autobiography, it feels
| he knew what every logic gate on the original Apple computer
| did.
|
| The PDP-10 probably worked at "human speed" too...
| mmooss wrote:
| > It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you
| make it"
|
| They are the all-time greatest in fake-it-til-you-make-it. They
| got the IBM PC OS contract without having an OS, which they
| bought from someone else (iirc).
|
| > What stands out to me about Gates and Allen is the serious
| technical chops. Writing an emulator for the PDP-10 and then an
| interpreter, line editor, I/O system all in 4KB of memory.
|
| Is that really so impressive? Everything then was in 4K, from
| all coders.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Cool Bill. But do you have what it takes to fix the onedrive
| shared folder bug that has been open for more than a year?
| creatonez wrote:
| Have you tried emailing random people who appear in the Windows
| 3.1 development team credits page? Maybe Daniel Stenberg, he
| definitely wrote some of the code that goes into Windows!
| froggertoaster wrote:
| I met Bill Gates briefly a few years ago. Nice guy. Definitely
| buying his book.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Damn this is cool. I think text is an underutilized medium for
| design.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft
|
| Maybe vomit. So many days lost trying to use Windows, Office and
| other "apps"[1] from Mictosoft.
|
| [1] They were never able to write programs.
| srb24 wrote:
| i thought they started by writing traffic control software,
| where's that source code? :)
| gloosx wrote:
| [flagged]
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Nice design
| firefax wrote:
| Why do I need to enable JS to view this website?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Since the site is an art project and not a site tuned for pure
| functionality.
| firefax wrote:
| I've seen many an art project that eventually stops being
| updated and is used to serve up malware -- sometimes with a
| bonus expired or nonexistent cert.
|
| It should never be a requirement to enable JS to download a
| binary file like a PDF.
|
| If you're concerned about scraping, put in a robots dot txt
| and/or give it to an entity like Internet Archive to host.
| nilsbunger wrote:
| Steve Jobs used to say the problem with Microsoft is they don't
| have taste.
|
| The font-shimmering effect on scroll immediately reminded me of
| that, it is really distracting. And you can't use reader mode to
| disable it.
|
| (FWIW, I'm a fan of Bill Gates and all he's done for the world)
| zelon88 wrote:
| Yes, I was shocked that Bill Gates's personal blog seems to
| have that "500 WordPress plugins" kinda vibe. Kinda reminds me
| of my old MySpace profile.
| kevincox wrote:
| FWIW the spinning scrolling effects of Apple release
| announcements are nearly as bad.
| graton wrote:
| Personally I like it :) Tastes differ.
| fsckboy wrote:
| get your hands on DONKEY.BAS you will love it!
| spookie wrote:
| I think it's pretty cool
| nerevarthelame wrote:
| On top of the poor readability, my 2-year-old laptop can't even
| navigate through the page without CPU and GPU going insane, and
| my fans blasting at max speed. It's the poorest, choppiest web
| performance I can recall, all for what should be a simple blog
| post.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| That's the fault of modern websites being massive JavaScript
| ad-playing behemoths instead of sub-1kB served HTML as god
| intended.
| bostik wrote:
| Tim Berners-Lee has been elevated to many things, but an
| ascension to deity must be a new reach.
| lkramer wrote:
| I don't know, did you see the 2012 Olympic opening
| ceremony?
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| Kernighan & Ritchie deserve company
| hbn wrote:
| Funny cause just today this made it to the front page of HN
|
| https://animejs.com/
|
| It has way fancier animations and scrolls like butter
| mimischi wrote:
| Makes me wonder: did Bill write all of this text? Did he decide
| this effect is cool and must go in? Did he even know about that
| text effect?
| toddmorey wrote:
| The design is fun and gave me a lot of nostalgia, but I admit
| they overdid it. They could have made that piece feel the same
| without so much distraction. And please people, support reader
| mode. It's not hard and it shouldn't be optional.
|
| EDIT: Good god they animated EVERYTHING. It's not even
| readable... also... not one inline code sample? This is the
| designer trying to get an awwwards site of the day without any
| interest in the actual content. It's like a guitar player that
| solos over everyone else's solos.
| piyuv wrote:
| "All he's done for the world" by copyrighting Covid vaccine,
| eh?
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Total sidenode but "Gates Notes" has to be one of the most exotic
| personal blogs I've ever seen. At this point would you even
| consider this a personal blog?
| queuebert wrote:
| Maybe Bill has really taken an interest in Javascript. /s
| TheGRS wrote:
| Yea, well I would consider it that in the sense that it seems
| like a mix of his personal interests, history, and promotion of
| stuff he cares about (his biography and foundation and various
| projects he's on). Its a unique site because he has the cash to
| hire people who put a great UX experience on top of it all. I
| think that's the main difference.
|
| Not that he's unique in this, but I do really appreciate his
| book lists. I usually grab a few books during the year based on
| his recommendations.
| enigma101 wrote:
| pretty slick
| n0rdy wrote:
| Flipping through the source code is like a time machine tour of
| tech's evolution over the past 50 years. It made me wonder: will
| our 2025 code look as ancient by 2075?
|
| And, btw, great infographics within the post.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Has there ever been a moment in human history where we've (as a
| society, not as individuals) looked back and were envious?
|
| So my money is that the code I wrote today is the joke of
| tomorrow - for all involved.
|
| Also, I for one don't want to go back to punch cards ;)
| bojan wrote:
| > Has there ever been a moment in human history where we've
| (as a society, not as individuals) looked back and were
| envious?
|
| I am guessing that generation that transitioned from Pax
| Romana to early middle ages in Europe.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| I doubt that since knowledge and education wasn't wide
| spread - beyond cloisters, people didn't general know how
| well the Romans had it.
|
| Remember it took until the Renaissance until ancient texts
| (Greek and Roman) were "rediscovered" by European scholars.
| prewett wrote:
| In all their cities they could see buildings that they
| did not know how to build. And before that, public
| services would have broken down. It would have become
| impossible to find people who knew how to repair your
| heated floor (if you were rich), etc. The city of Rome
| declined from 1 million people to something like 20,000.
| In the late 500s, Pope Gregory the Great thought that the
| world was ending because of all the trouble (including
| vicious barbarian invasions). Monks (and presumably
| anyone educated) had access to a lot of ancient texts, it
| was only some that got lost in the West. I think they
| would have had a distinct sense that that past was more
| advanced.
| freedomben wrote:
| That's interesting to consider. Some of the GNU code is getting
| quite old and looking through it is a blast from the past. I'm
| frankly amazed that it continues to work so well. I suspect
| there is a relatively small group of GNU hackers out there
| rocking gray and white beards that are silently powering the
| foundations of our modern world, and I worry what's going to
| happen when they start retiring. Maybe we'll get rust rewrites
| of everything and a new generation will take over, but frankly
| I'm pretty worried about it.
| deanCommie wrote:
| I think to most (90+%?) software developers out their in the
| world, Assembler might as well be hieroglyphics. They/we can
| guess at the concepts involved of course, but actually being
| able to read the code end to end, and have a mental model of
| what is happening is not really going to happen. Not without
| some sort of Rosetta Stone. (Comments :) )
|
| I think 2075 developers will feel the same way about modern
| Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.
|
| They will think of themselves as software developers but they
| won't be writing code the same way, they'll be giving guided
| instructions to much higher level tools (perhaps AIs that
| themselves have a provenance back to modern LLMs)
|
| Just as today there will still be those that need to write low
| level critical code. There are still lots of people today that
| have to write Assembler, though end up expressing it via C or
| Rust. And there will be people still working on AI technology.
| But even those will be built off other AI's.
| amai wrote:
| Source code published as PDF? Come on, this should be published
| on Github.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Gates pivoting back to being a "computer genius" reflects how
| badly his philanthropic reputation laundering operation is going.
| MrFurious wrote:
| This website froze my phone, not joking.
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Everything Bill touches gets frozen at some point of time...
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Yeah, there's sort of a glitchy virus matrixy thing going on
| with the text as I scroll and it's really weird.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| What's compelling is that he basically starts off saying that
| they lied... to MITS.
| djmips wrote:
| Trial balloon is the euphemism used in the Wiki article.
| prewett wrote:
| I sort of knew the story, but the way Gates presents it in his
| article makes it pretty blunt. There is no contrition; rather
| it is a story of glorious success, a story of hard work to be
| proud of, all started by the lie. In fact, the lie is presented
| as the nucleating event, as positive thing that spurred them to
| turn the lie into truth.
|
| To me it felt consonant with the ethics of Harvard, and more
| saliently, the fact that their founding event was a lie seems
| consonant with the trajectory of the company. The summary of
| the book makes it sound like the real title is "A Glorious
| Life", and I would expect no contrition about DR DOS, Netscape,
| and other Microsoft ruthlessness under Gates.
|
| (To be fair, I loathe Microsoft and their products, which help
| me accomplish my goals the way a spoon helps me cut a steak,
| and I have never seen Gates as virtuous. So I am hardly
| unbiased.)
| sumedh wrote:
| Fake it till you make it.
|
| Oracle did the same.
| djmips wrote:
| A recent disassembly of, I think the same code.
| https://github.com/option8/Altair-BASIC/blob/master/BASIC%20...
|
| I checked in a few places at the start and towards the end (the
| sin function) and they matched.
| djmips wrote:
| Note that the constants in the PDF are in Octal!
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Tried to open this page and the music I was streaming started to
| stutter so hard I just exed out. Is this a preposterously heavy
| page, or just very heavy?
| jlmcgraw wrote:
| I wonder who the handwritten notes on page 98 are by?
|
| Starts with "confirm plane reservation on Tue. Sept 2 or Wed.
| Sept 3" which is correct for 1975
| PythonicIT wrote:
| I'm not as smart as you guys but I figured that I'm going to try
| and write wine for life every single thing on GitHub unless
| someone has done it already so that we could try to compile and
| build this thing directly on our own computers.
___________________________________________________________________
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