Comment by ThrowawayR2
9 days ago
> "...so printouts of code would be thrown in trash. And that's where Bill Gates found the source code for Basic interpreter, which he ported and it became the first Microsoft product"
Both sources you link to say Allen and Gates pulled listings of the PDP-10 operating system out (probably DEC's TOPS-10?) of the trash. BASIC is not an operating system. So your claim is debunked by your own sources.
"...digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."
https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm
"...He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system..."
And Apple stole a UI from Xerox Parc. Open AI stole everyone's content.
This is how the industry innovates
This is a myth. Jobs negotiated access to PARC technology as part of a deal in which Xerox bought shares in Apple at $10/share[0], selling about a year later at $22/share. Those shares would be worth around $5 billion today.
Xerox did later sue Apple for IP infringement, however most of their claims were dismissed[1].
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
[1] https://arlingtonmnnews.com/articles/bits-and-bytes/xerox-ve...
> Xerox bought shares in Apple at $10/share[0], selling about a year later at $22/share.
> [0] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
I searched the cite for the 'share', '10', '22', 'sold, 'sell', 'bought', 'buy', 'purchase', and found nothing. ?
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Now AIs are stealing from AIs.
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That article is a bit confusing because it's using the term "BASIC" to refer to both the language and Microsoft's implementation. But what it's trying to say is that Microsoft's BASIC implementation was licensed by many computer companies (including Commodore and Atari) and that those companies changed and extended it in incompatible ways.
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That's not what that says at all. It says that the language was slightly different depending on the platform.
Microsoft basic wasn't the first basic interpreter which is a different claim than Microsoft basic source was copied from another interpreter.
What part of that paragraph you quoted suggests that Microsoft BASIC wasn't original work?
Those were their own ports, as per the page you just linked. They developed Microsoft BASIC.
"The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer."