GW-Basic

Here's a definitive response from Dr. Greg Whitten on this early history of Microsoft's BASIC, as well as other interesting material on the history of Microsoft's scripting languages, up to present-day .NET technologies. - John Subject: FW: GW-Basic MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-class: urn:content-classes:message Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 10:59:35 -0700 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5.7226.0 Message-ID: <5D48D9BE244AF5438B62E7BC4FBBF21D0A044A at medina-mail.whitten.net> X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: Thread-Topic: GW-Basic Thread-Index: AcVAPieWGJjLtpsESryrJFxdQKZpmQAAH5pw From: "Gregory Whitten" <gregw at whitten.net> To: <jfoust at threedee.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by pc.threedee.com id j3DHL4O23678 Status: John, If GW-BASIC is named for anyone, it is probably me because I developed the Microsoft BASIC language standards in the BASIC Compiler line. The BASIC interpreter was much harder to extend and usually followed afterwards. The other story is that it stands for Gee-Whiz BASIC and it sounded good to the Japanese OEMs at the time because it had graphics features added to the language. Some of them were similar to BASIC extensions that I had made to Microsoft BASIC when I worked previously at Intelligent Systems Corporation which was a Microsoft OEM. ISC was probably the only Microsoft OEM that actually had the source code for the products at that time because I had to extensively modify them to run on our more restricted memory machines. I left ISC in 1979 to join Microsoft as Director of New Products (BASIC Compiler, APL, and graphics - APL never shipped). I don't know what my exact employee number was - probably around 16. The GW-BASIC name stands for Gee-Whiz BASIC. The GW- name was picked by Bill Gates. He is the one who knows whether it was Gee-Whiz or after me because it has been used both ways. I did set the directions for the BASIC language features after joining the company in 1979. I also introduced the first object-oriented device drive interfaces into BASIC (essentially the first use of C++-style vtables in 1979 well before C++) and created the operating system abstraction layer that was used to port of the Microsoft's language products to many operating systems. Before I got there, each OS port was done by conditional compilation scattered through out the source code. After I did this work, it usually took one-half a day to port all of our products to a new OS instead of weeks except for the BASIC Interpreter which I did the abstraction layer for later. On the Joel Spolsky subject he was a basically ignorant junior employee who left Microsoft after a short number of years. His short sighted decisions to take the VB macro language in Excel in its own directions caused 6 other major applications that were doing BASIC macro languages to diverge and not be able to share any macro programs between the applications. He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. The applications group spent 30 man-years integrating custom interfaces for each application with the Office 95 applications. In Office 98 they tossed it all and went back to my original suggestion which only took 1.5 man-years to develop and provided better commonality and learning between the applications. I was one of the three original Chief Software Architects at Microsoft. I initially managed the Language development groups and graphics products. I was the major designer for the BASIC language and compiler, the memory models (including near and far) used by Microsoft languages and operating systems - (DOS, Windows, OS/2, and XENIX - this is the reason plus my design to allow preemptive multitasking in real mode that Windows was almost trivial to move to protect mode - all of the segmented real-mode apps just ran by original design that the Windows team itself did not fully comprehend), the runtime libraries that allowed all of Microsoft's languages to interoperate (BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, COBOL, and C). I started the Microsoft's graphics efforts including the Windows project. Marline Eller and Rao Remula worked for me. I was responsible for the infamous assembly language WINDOWS.INC macros and memory segmentation. I did the design for the multi-layered GDI which was implemented by Marlin Eller who worked for me (co-author of the Barbarian at the Gates). I was the architect and designed the incremental compiler technology and multi-stage pseudo-code design for QuickBASIC 4.0 which carried through VB 6.0. That pcode is much faster than .NET's CIL or the pcode used in Excel which I showed the Excel team how to speed up so that it was faster than Lotus 1-2-3. I did a few other "minor" things (when I was not having lunch with Bill) like setting the object technology strategy for the entire company including working on the design of OS/2 and an object oriented version of OS/2 that never shipped because of the divorce with IBM. I shifted 1988. I was the chief architect for OLE and COM and did all of the original requirement analyses for the feature breadth of OLE to support compound documents across 19 applications for release with Windows 95. This is what let Office 95 distance itself from Lotus who was late supporting good application interoperability. The design for OLE and COM had location transparency I also personally managed the training of Microsoft's software architects and the advanced object oriented training for component software design in the company's products. It was my insights into multi-vendor component oriented systems using interfaces that changed the object oriented world. I was Microsoft's original representative for the OMG (Object Management Group). I made the decision not to educate the OMG on the true requirements for component software systems and left them to go in their own failed directions based on implementation inheritance software engineering techniques which don't work for systems. They eventually changed their model in CORBA 3.0 to include interfaces by which time they were irrelevant. I also personally wrote the strategy roadmap (95 pages) that was used by Paul Maritz to eventually pull together the .NET technology pieces. As you can see, I personally lead the efforts for every predecessor technology that was used in .NET. That is why I was the only Chief Software Architect that did true architecture in a company-wide strategic context. Unfortunately, for Microsoft and .NET, I left the company in 1998. The .NET team made a number of significant mistakes in implementing support for component oriented software because they were new and unfamiliar with COM. They are still not fixed today and to build truly innovative scalable distributed systems one has to create a layer over the .NET object model. Pam Edstrom's daughter made so many mistakes in her book that it is not a credible piece of work. My brother Gordon did work in my languages group initially and later worked for Marlin Eller on a post-Windows project. I was Microsoft's first Ph.D. employee. I received my Ph.D. from Harvard in Applied Mathematics in 1978. I was a world class expert in graph theory, analysis of algorithms, sparse matrix algorithms for linear systems, numerical analysis, and non-linear multi-variate time series analyis before arriving at Microsoft to write language compilers. I wrote survey papers for and with Robert Tarjan and others on graph theory while I was working on my degree. While an undergraduate at University of Virginia from 1970-1973, I rewrote about 30% of HP's 2000 series BASIC Timesharing System to improve the BASIC language and OS features to make it more suitable for computer aided instruction in the Engineering School. I have a long history with improving BASIC since 1970. I added many new statements, recursive subroutines and functions with parameters, inter-language calling, data structures, include files and separate compilation units, etc. I am sorry about the long winded response, but I felt it was time to straighten out some of the actual facts surrounding the early days of Microsoft that are commonly misreported. Gregory Whitten