Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's original source code

Re:Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's origin... by kragen on Friday April 04, 2025 @03:31PM (#43586743)

Also, though, how big was Apple Integer BASIC? As I understand it, you had an entire PDP-10 at your disposal when you wrote the Fortran version of Empire.

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Re:Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's origin... by WalterBright on Friday April 04, 2025 @04:13PM (#43587156)

I did learn how to program on the -10. A marvelous experience.

Looking backwards, writing an integer basic is a trivial exercise. But back in the 70s, I had no idea how to write such a thing.

Around 1978, Hal Finney (yes, that guy) wrote an integer basic for the Mattel Intellivision (with its wacky 10 bit microprocessor) that fit in a 2K EPROM. Of course, Hal was (a lot) smarter than the average bear.

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Re:Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's origin... by kragen on Friday April 04, 2025 @07:09PM (#43588695)

Interesting, I didn't know that! I didn't know him until the 90s, and didn't meet him in person until his CodeCon presentation.

What I was trying to express—perhaps poorly—is that maybe floating-point support would have been more effort than the entire Integer BASIC. (Incidentally, as I understand it, nobody has found a bug in Apple Integer BASIC yet, which makes it a nontrivial achievement from my point of view.)

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