31–40 of 47 posts
No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape , I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
I have been researching/playing around with Macro-10 using the simh PDP-10 emulator just for fun recently. I have always been curious about the inner workings of the 8080 emulator Paul Allen developed for running this code on a "fake" Altair. Maybe this source code could provide some insight into how Micro-Soft went about getting to a fully working BASIC for the Altair step by step from the very beginning.
Gates and Allen used (stole computer time) at Harvard's PDP-10 and other computer resources in developing this proprietary code.
" Harvard officials were not pleased that Gates and Allen (who was not a student) had used the PDP-10 to develop a commercial product, but determined that the computer itself, which technically belonged to the military, was not covered by any Harvard policy; the PDP-10 was controlled by Professor Thomas Cheatham, who felt that students could use the machine for personal use. Harvard placed restrictions on the computer's use, and Gates and Allen had to use a commercial time share computer in Boston to finalize the software."
There were Basic clones for the Altair, you don't need propietary ones. Heck, even CP/M 2.2 it's free software today.
"Tiny BASIC was designed by Dennis Allison and the People's Computer Company (PCC) in response to the open letter published by Bill Gates complaining about users pirating Altair BASIC, which sold for $150. Tiny BASIC was intended to be a completely free version of BASIC that would run on the same early microcomputers."
No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape , I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
I reckon there are ~40,000 lines in the printout. So: ~10 years.
No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape , I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
I'm just impressed nobody peeled away the perforations on this printout: https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...
Unfortunately we don't seem to have the MCS8080 macros to assemble this in the original way. Hopefully they will turn up eventually
We have a decompile of the BASIC, and the binary.
Please read Bill Gates's Letter to Hobbyists and don't do this. He's not going to be happy that people are ripping off his Altair BASIC and not giving him any money. What you're doing is just not fair to him.
Gates has many faults, but his current life consists of mostly positive stuff (such as fighting climate change, global hunger, diseases, lack of clean water) that I and others support.
I will absolutely never support his past actions, but currently? I can name a whole bunch of billionaires that are doing worse. Like nearly all of them.