[Info-vax] OT: Paul Allen and Bill Gates

[Neil Rieck]

I've been reading Paul Allen's book "Idea Man: A Memoir by the
Cofounder of Microsoft" for the past few days now and it contains lots
of stuff I didn't know like:

1) Harvard student, Monte Davidoff, developed floating point math
routines for the PDP-8 and was hired by Gates and Allen to add them to
Altair BASIC.

2) Microsoft wrote the TRS-80 BASIC, AppleSoft BASIC, and Commodore
BASIC. (I knew Steve Wozniak had written Integer BASIC for the Apple ]
[ but never knew who wrote AppleSoft)

3) Their preferred development platform was a DEC PDP-10 running
TOPS-10. This was true at Harvard all the way through the Albuquerque
days (where they leased time from a school) until they moved to
Washington where they bought a new DEC 2020 (DECSYSTEM-20)

4) Why they developed the Z80 Softcard and how it caused Apple ]
[ sales to soar while bringing in additional software revenues to
Digital Research (for CP/M) and Microsoft (for the various languages
which already ran on the 8080).

more to come as time permits...

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/