Re:Jobs and Woz (2011)
by adventured on Monday August 19, 2019 @08:14PM
(#20742859)
> Paul Allen was known as a much better programmer than Bill Gates.
In his book, Idea Man, Paul Allen openly proclaims that Bill Gates was a superior programmer to him. Allen says that he was, however, better than Gates in other ways, including when it came to assembly or anything working very close to hardware (Allen's most important Microsoft product after the very early days, was for example the SoftCard).
Further, Allen illuminates in his book that Gates was in fact an extraordinary programmer. He notes that Gates had a particular gift for raw output, endurance and figuring out ways to make their code as efficient in size as it could possibly be.
This article lends further support:
"Could Bill Gates write code? Yes. And then some, Altair BASIC dis-assemblers reckon"
> Reuben Harris has been disassembling a binary with some help from Monte Davidoff, the third author of Altair BASIC (along with Gates and Paul Allen) and who we interviewed here last week. He has the same question in mind:
> "'Could Bill Gates Write Code?' Or was he merely the luckiest man alive," before concluding... "Yes He Bloody Could!"
> Although Reuben's analysis is not quite complete, he tells us that Gates, Allen and Davidoff threw every trick at the book to squeeze the interpreter into 4 kilobytes. They succeeded and left some headroom for the programs themselves - without which it would have been pretty useless, of course.
> "It was pretty incredible - they were pretty good at what they were doing," he tells us.
In his book, Idea Man, Paul Allen openly proclaims that Bill Gates was a superior programmer to him. Allen says that he was, however, better than Gates in other ways, including when it came to assembly or anything working very close to hardware (Allen's most important Microsoft product after the very early days, was for example the SoftCard).
Further, Allen illuminates in his book that Gates was in fact an extraordinary programmer. He notes that Gates had a particular gift for raw output, endurance and figuring out ways to make their code as efficient in size as it could possibly be.
This article lends further support:
"Could Bill Gates write code? Yes. And then some, Altair BASIC dis-assemblers reckon"
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_wr...
> Reuben Harris has been disassembling a binary with some help from Monte Davidoff, the third author of Altair BASIC (along with Gates and Paul Allen) and who we interviewed here last week. He has the same question in mind:
> "'Could Bill Gates Write Code?' Or was he merely the luckiest man alive," before concluding... "Yes He Bloody Could!"
> Although Reuben's analysis is not quite complete, he tells us that Gates, Allen and Davidoff threw every trick at the book to squeeze the interpreter into 4 kilobytes. They succeeded and left some headroom for the programs themselves - without which it would have been pretty useless, of course.
> "It was pretty incredible - they were pretty good at what they were doing," he tells us.