Altair BASIC

At 02:42 PM 1/26/99 +1100, Andrew Davie wrote: He's mentioned in the "An Open Letter to Hobbyists", dated 2/3/76: | Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to | expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the | initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of | the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. I also found references to him as an co-author of "format_pl1", a PL/I formatting program, and also worked on PL/I itself and Multics' "transaction processing" features. He was apparently a fellow Harvard student with Gates and Allen. Monte N. Davidoff is one of the "Multicians," a programmer responsible for some part of the MULTICS operating system. He may be reachable at &lt;mnd(a)multicians.org&gt;rg>. Other info is at <http://www.multicians.org/>. I saw another reference that said he's mentioned briefly in the book "Programmers at work" by Microsoft Press, in Gates' explanation along side a reproduction of the first page of the source list of Altair BASIC, with the quote "Paul Allen and I wrote this, Monte Davidoff wrote all math stuff." An excerpt is below. He's also mentioned on page 77 and 78 of "Hard Drive", said another reference. All this was gathered by a few minutes searching with www.dejanews.com and www.hotbot.com, with the string "Monte Davidoff". I know, it's far easier to enter a message that says "I wonder what happened to him," and wait for the oracles to whisper the answer. :-) - John