On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 05:30:02PM -0400, Walter Knopf wrote:
> Eric,
>
> my first program was the original Bill Gates MBasic interpreter, took about
> 20 minutes to load
> from one of those tape readers on a terminal.
I skipped that stage - went from punchcards right to the latest advance
in technology <fanfare>: CASSETTE TAPE! That only took about 4 minutes
to load the boot tape, and another 2 or so for the "Utilities" tape,
including MSBasic. Mega-fast, man!
(I've still got a letter from Billy-boy somewhere that he sent to me and
a couple of hundred others, about how we were all crooks because
somebody had copied his precious MSBasic... which he had copied from
Altair and modified. Along with keyboard driver code that he had copied
from me (and didn't even bother modifying.) Along with Gary Kildall's
CPM, which he out-and-out ripped off. Along with Tim Patterson's QDOS,
which he bought but didn't license - as he was supposed to - before
pimping it to IBM. Along with the whole GUI-and-mouse idea, which he
stole wholesale from Xerox PARC. But, y'know, old history.)
> Wish I would have kept it,
> probably would be
> worth something to historians (I am one of those dinos, having programmed in
> MACHINE LANGUAGE,
> octal, of course, it was an Intel chip, write the program on a piece of
> papervidushi).
PDP-11 or something like that, I take it? My machine language days are
quite a ways behind me, but the tools I used were always based on hex
rather than octal.
> I am getting close to selling my boat, a Liberty 28 (1979, full keel, 4,800
> pounds) because of age, just can't keep
> up the maintenance. Any takers? I'll train you in sailing the Spanish
> Virgins... 82 degrees every day.
Ah, my old stomping grounds. Lovely sailing around Culebra, and the
western end of Vieques.
Ben
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