51–60 of 151 posts
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In retrospect, MS-DOS was a rather trivial program. Sometimes I wonder why I and/or many others did not write an equivalent, even just for fun.
FreeDOS is one such program. It comes in quite handy at times.
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Kinda saddens me that society usually aligns with marketing and business mindset (impressing, selling, profiting) instead of people like Kildall. There are many passionated, driven, creative, prolific people with intrisic motivations that are wasted due to commercial forces.
I remember the early IBM PC days. PC-DOS was $40. CPM/86 was $240. Both were available, people simply picked the cheaper one. I used both, and there was nothing better about CPM/86. Due to inflation, this is like $113 vs $679 today. It was a no-brainer to buy MS-DOS instead. Kildall clearly was a businessman wanting to make money off of it.
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In particular, his mother – Mary Maxwell Gates – was on the United Way board along with IBM’s chairman John Opel and reportedly discussed her son’s company with Opel a few weeks before they made the decision to license MS-DOS. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...
There's little doubt that Ms Gates suggested that IBM look into Bill Gates, but I seriously doubt that IBM made the major business decision to contract with Gates because of his mother's suggestion.
"“Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the personal computer industry, but you probably don’t know his name. Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he ‘missed’ the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a ‘could-have-been,’ ignores his deep contributions, and overshadows his role as an inventor of key tec…
Let's be frank. Gates was from the WASP elites, old money stuff. IBM would probably find a reason to give him the deal rather than to Gary no matter what.
I wish Gary was one of the people that the average joe associated with "people who are known for doing computer things", instead of only people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. His accomplishments cannot be overstated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#Recognition
That should automatically tell us we shouldn't trust them, and yet fandoms and followings abound.
I wish Gary was one of the people that the average joe associated with "people who are known for doing computer things", instead of only people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. His accomplishments cannot be overstated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#Recognition
At least gates could program...
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> BASIC compiler Interpreter - an entirely different kind of animal. Microsoft didn't get a BASIC compiler until much later. > He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating point numbers. No. He sold Apple a BASIC, then used it as leverage to prevent Apple from making a BASIC for the Macintosh. > Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch. He suggested cutting Paul Allen's family off when A…
Um, it is necessary to compile a program before being able to interpret it. I don't know how early BASICs were implemented, but the usual method is to compile it to some sort of intermediate representation, and then interpret that representation. D's compile time function execution engine works that way. So does the Javascript compiler/interpreter engine I wrote years ago, and the Java compiler I wrote eons ago. The…
Um, no? your experience is probably at least two decades after the time period in question.. The more advanced versions of, for example, the TRS-80 BASIC (part of this "microcomputer BASICs that all share a common set of bugs") did no more than tokenize - so, `10 PRINT "Hello"` would have a binary representation for the line number, a single byte token for PRINT, then " H E L L O " and an end-of-line marker. Actually interpreting the code involved just reading it linearly; GOTO linenumber involved scanning the entire code in memory for that line number (and yes, people really did optimize things by putting GOTO and GOSUB targets earlier in the program so the interpreter would find them faster :-)
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> BASIC compiler Interpreter - an entirely different kind of animal. Microsoft didn't get a BASIC compiler until much later. > He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating point numbers. No. He sold Apple a BASIC, then used it as leverage to prevent Apple from making a BASIC for the Macintosh. > Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch. He suggested cutting Paul Allen's family off when A…
Um, it is necessary to compile a program before being able to interpret it. I don't know how early BASICs were implemented, but the usual method is to compile it to some sort of intermediate representation, and then interpret that representation. D's compile time function execution engine works that way. So does the Javascript compiler/interpreter engine I wrote years ago, and the Java compiler I wrote eons ago. The…
Many programming languages parse their program to an AST then walk that AST interpretting as they go. But for BASIC you can parse/execute statement by statement - no need to parse the whole program ahead of time, and certainly zero need to compile to either machine code or any internal representation.
Remember at the time we're talking about 64k was a lot of RAM. Some machines had less.
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> BASIC compiler Interpreter - an entirely different kind of animal. Microsoft didn't get a BASIC compiler until much later. > He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating point numbers. No. He sold Apple a BASIC, then used it as leverage to prevent Apple from making a BASIC for the Macintosh. > Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch. He suggested cutting Paul Allen's family off when A…
Um, it is necessary to compile a program before being able to interpret it. I don't know how early BASICs were implemented, but the usual method is to compile it to some sort of intermediate representation, and then interpret that representation. D's compile time function execution engine works that way. So does the Javascript compiler/interpreter engine I wrote years ago, and the Java compiler I wrote eons ago. The…
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Um, it is necessary to compile a program before being able to interpret it. I don't know how early BASICs were implemented, but the usual method is to compile it to some sort of intermediate representation, and then interpret that representation. D's compile time function execution engine works that way. So does the Javascript compiler/interpreter engine I wrote years ago, and the Java compiler I wrote eons ago. The…
> necessary to compile Um, no? your experience is probably at least two decades after the time period in question.. The more advanced versions of, for example, the TRS-80 BASIC (part of this "microcomputer BASICs that all share a common set of bugs") did no more than tokenize - so, `10 PRINT "Hello"` would have a binary representation for the line number, a single byte token for PRINT, then " H E L L O " and an end-o…
It's a VM of a sort, and the p-code the VM executes is tokenized input.