Re:Melinda Gates: Bill's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein l...
by petilon on Friday March 04, 2022 @02:33PM
(#30559312)
> The differences in architecture and memory constraints between a PDP-10 and an 8080 are too great for it to be feasible to steal code.
So if I take someone else's assembly code and port it to a new architecture then that's not a derivative work? Interesting stance!
Uhm...no. The DEC computer they used when developing Altair BASIC was a PDP-10. DEC BASIC and Altair BASIC were both written in assembly language. The differences in architecture and memory constraints between a PDP-10 and an 8080 are too great for it to be feasible to steal code. At best you could use the PDP-10 code to learn some algorithms and then write your own versions for the 8080.
What people saying it was stolen from DEC are probably doing is getting confused over Gates and Allen's use of an 8080 emulator they had written earlier for PDP-10. When they decided to do an Altair BASIC they modified their 8080 emulator to be an Altair emulator and did all the testing and debugging of their 8080 BASIC on that since they did not have access to an actual Altair 8080.
That PDP-10 was owned by Harvard, and there was some question over whether or not using it for a commercial project like that was something students were allowed to do using their free accounts.