[cctalk] Re: Altair BASIC Source Code released

On Thu, Apr 03, 2025 at 02:40:23PM -0400, Michael Thompson via cctalk wrote: While there have been plenty of disassemblies around, I assume this thread is the announcement of Bill Gate's releasing the actual source code up on his blog.. https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code Looks like you can get a PDF of scans of a greenbar printout of his/Paul Allen's source from 1975. As described in Bill Gate's recent auto-biography (Source Code: My Beginnings), or Paul Allen's auto-biography (Idea Man), they developed their BASIC code on the PDP-10 because they both had been hacking on the PDP-10 for their previous projects for a couple years?, and Paul Allen had written an 8080 emulator (somehow with macro?) for the system, and they could emulate the 8080 chip before the Altair 8800 existed (for real, not the dummy one they pre-announced in the magazine ahead of it actually shipping). So I don't think the 8080 Source code of Altair BASIC would do you much on the PDP-10 without also having Paul Allen's macro package for the 8080 emulation and developer system that they were doing. As they explained in their books, an Altair with 4k wasn't exactly a system anything could be developed on, so the various PDP-10's they rented time on was utilized as the dev system, and they seeked that one out because they had the support system already in place for what they were doing. (ie. emulator/macro package/assembler/linker) They later were able to successfully do the same emulation trick with the other micro CPUs that they wrote basic for until PCs could actually start hosting dev environments (many years later).