GW-Basic

At 09:07 PM 4/12/2005, you wrote: At least one of the Wiki articles point to Joel Spolsky's page at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/TwoStories.html , where he describes a meeting during his employment at Microsoft: "This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him." http://www.pcmag.co.uk/analysis/74182 tells another anecdote from the book "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" where Greg Whitten is the head of a graphics group in the autumn of '83. A new hire uncovers a bug in BASIC's flood-fill, shows his fix to Whitten and Gates and he's told the error was in Gates' code. However, other Chapter One excerpts of the same book such as http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/barbariansl… say his name is Gordon Whitten. Or maybe "Gordo" was a nickname and someone assumed it meant Gordon although his real name was Greg. I'm not well-acquainted with this particular book, but I read somewhere it was co-written by Pam Edstrom's daughter and a Microsoft employee, so perhaps they didn't do top-quality fact-checking. The "GW" matches "Gates, William" too. Dr. Greg Whitten looks reachable at http://www.numerix.com/company/execMgmt.htm, too. I'll ask him to reconcile the stories. - John