18 Oct
2022
18 Oct
'22
9:43 p.m.
Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2022 23:08:23 -0500
From: Steve Lewis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
I recall the story by Paul Allen - they had developed
a BASIC, but didn't
have a boot loader to load it, and Paul wrote one while on the airplane to
MOS.
MITS, not MOS.
Messrs. Allen, Gates, and Davidoff wrote their BASIC for the Altair 8800 using
a chip emulator created by Allen using the Unimplemented User Operation (UUO)
facility of the PDP-10. He originally emulated the 8008, but updated it when
the 8080 came out.
He recreated the boot code for us to use on our restored 8800 at LCM+L, so that
he could demonstrate the Altair BASIC for Leslie Stahl when she interviewed him
for "60 Minutes" (when his memoir "Idea Man" was first published). He
spent
several weeks at the nascent museum debugging the BASIC interpreter prior to
her visit--we did not have the final code he demo'd at MITS, but backups of the
development sources, so he had to fix some known bugs.
Rich