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

[Rich Alderson]

Neil Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> writes:

> 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.

The PDP-8/e running at Living Computer Museum was originally put together by a
gent who was recreating the system on which he learned to program in high
school.  When he was a sophomore and began programming on the system (running
TSS/8, inspired by Tops-10), there was a senior who was the de facto operator
by the name of Monte Davidoff.  Monte has confirmed the story to me.

> 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)

We restored an 8800 to running condition so that Paul Allen could recreate the
feel of loading a paper tape of the original BASIC (recovered from his own
DECtapes by yours truly).  He compiled the 8080 simulator on our 2065, punched
the tape on an ASR-33, then loaded it into the 8800.  (This was the 8800 and
Teletype used in the Leslie Stahl interview, part of which was filmed at the
museum.)

> 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).

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org

-- 
Rich Alderson                                   news at alderson.users.panix.com
    the russet leaves of an autumn oak/inspire once again the failed poet/
    to take up his pen/and essay to place his meagre words upon the page...