[cctalk] Re: Experience using an Altair 8800 ("Personal computer" from 70s)

First, Dave wrote: Which is on the face of it incorrect. Then Christian Corti responded (in replying to someone else's objection to Dave's claim of firstness: > > Which is nearer the mark, but not fully correct. Then Sellam Abraham stuck his oar in: > Oh, FFS, Sellam. OK. Once again, the history goes like this. I have heard it from the horses' mouths (yes, plural). Bill Gates and Paul Allen, along with 4 other students (out of a class of about 20), really cottoned onto programming in BASIC when a class was offered at their school, the Lakeside School in Seattle. That class used a remote timesharing service called GEIS (General Electric Information System), which ran on GE 635 computers. The six boys (it was a boys' school until the next year when it went co-ed) were allowed to visit a new computer service bureau called CCC, because one of their mothers was acquainted with one of the primaries. This company was using a DEC PDP-10 timesharing system; the boys were given guest accounts under the proviso that when the system crashed they would document what they were doing at the time of the crash. They were so eager to learn that the systems programmers (two MIT alums and a Stanford alum) allowed them access to the hardware and system call reference manuals, so that they learned assembler programming as well as BASIC, to an expert level. The summer between Paul's graduation and starting college, he along with Bill and three others of the group got ACTUAL PAYING JOBS PROGRAMMING PDP-10 SYSTEMS FOR THE BONNEVILLE POWER ADMINISTRATION, on a project called RODS (Real-time Operational Data System) which used the systems for control purposes. (The sixth member of their coterie got a job as a junior ranger at Mount Rainier National Park, so wasn't interested in being indoors all day all summer.) Paul dropped out of college after his sophomore year and moved to the Boston area, where he worked for Honeywell's software division and hung out with Bill and Bill's college friends, meanwhile looking for a way to have a small computer of their own. They read the industry magazines to news of small systems. In the mean time, they tried to create a company to sell a traffic counting device based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor. The prototype hardware failed in their first demonstration to the City of Seattle traffic department, and they shelved the idea. When the Altair issue of Popular Electronics came out in mid-December 1974 (cover data January 1975), they were prepared for the challenge. After ascertaining that Ed Roberts and MITS would entertain the idea of looking at a BASIC interpreter for the new system, they sat down and created one from whole cloth, with the division of labor as follows: Bill Gates: the interpreter itself Paul Allen: a simulator running on the PDP-10 for the Intel 8080 processor Monte Davidoff: a math whiz freshman who wrote the transcendental math routines (My sources are Paul Allen and Bob Barnett. Bob was Paul and Bill's manager at RODS, and the original business manager for Living Computer Museum. I have no reason to believe that either had any reason to lie to me.) Micro-soft incorporated in June/July 1975, so six months after they wrote their first 8080 machine code, so Dave is wrong about "long before Microsoft". And Sellam is simply wrong. Rich