Bill Gates Open Sources Microsoft's First Program

In this video I discuss the story of how Microsoft Developed a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 and why Bill Gates Open Sourced the code for this first program that Microsoft ever developed to celebrate 50 years of the companies existence.

See the source code here

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[Archstrct]

Impressive. Very nice. Let's see Paul Allens code

[ChryseCoder]

Such good news, if this is becomes a legit thing, then in the next millennia, Microsoft will have open sourced Windows 95 to the public.

[derramk]

Of course the Microsoft "open source" code is a fucking picture of the source code.

Of course.

[Cyberfoxxy]

Oh, they are doing what Carmack did for Quake. Only 40 years later.

[McVaio]

The PDF scan is from a printout from 1975, which is why it's cool that it's in PDF. You can see the original annotations from the time.

[rhodaborrocks]

That's something I'd completely forgotten about, the printing out of the entire source code on completion of a project onto reams and reams of fan fold paper, but those printouts were actually used back then as an aid to debugging and maintenance due to primitive nature of the line editors available at the time.

[daviddaniel]

Sad that you didn’t mention “An open letter to hobbyists” where bill gets mad at people pirating the interpreter

[drumboy]

wow! and only 49 years after bill's famous open letter to hobbyists!

[michael_]

no way the mf's released a pdf file of their program💀

[daliag_]

I'm sorry, "Microsoft" and "open source" in the same sentence doesn't seem to make any sense

[brielslovak]

It feels so strange to learn about absolutely anything going on in the Microsoft space without hating it

[alsadekalkhayer]

Win7, open-source... That would be something

[hydra]

I arrived so early I saw all the pron bots lol

[GordonChil]

I was in 9th grade in 1997 when I read a very simple Bill Gates biography from the school library where he talked about "the coolest program I ever wrote". I didn't read many books at that age, but I read that one. That story about it running the first time they fed it in was very interesting and stuck with me. I was super into computers; I had dabbled in QBasic. Now 28 years later I'm a software developer myself and the source code for the "coolest program" is released. This feels very special to me. What an amazing piece of computer science history.

[josephbrandenburg]

0:27 impressive. Very nice. Now let's see his card.

[ListersHatsune]

Open sourcing this is actually pretty symbolic. Back in the day, Microsoft went to war over the piracy of their software against those who believed software should be free. Both sides of the argument went on to become highly influential on computing to this day.

[srit]

4:20 the intel 8080 and 8086 is still studied in universities to teach assemby, that was a huge step forward

[batchampa]

Back then, the basic interpreter was kind of the operating system. It was the high level interface to the hardware but wouldn't hold up to the definition of an operating system by today's standards

[DanielKarnole-fshm]

“Microsoft and open sourced”, is like having “CIA and declassified” in the same sentence. Very rare, but when it happens it’s useless.

[sundhaug]

The base model of the Altair actually just had 256 bytes of RAM, but the smallest targeted by MS-BASIC was 4k. The machine didn't really ship with "assembly", because it didn't ship with an assembler. Instead what you got was a machine, that you'd use the toggle-switches to enter the opcodes and data with. Even to start BASIC, you'd normally have to enter a small program using the switches that would read in the interpreter.