🚀 go-pugleaf

Ricky Beam gave us a bit of history, but there's a _lot_ more to it than
that.

Bill Gates's genuine claim to fame is that he wrote the first high quality,
portable BASIC interpreter that included floating point. Before Bill, there
were expensive BASIC's for minicomputers in a university environment,
expensive BASIC's for industrial control systems, cheap BASIC's with no
strings and 16-bit integer-only arithmetic for whoever would buy them, and
crippled partial BASIC's for home computing.

In the mid 70's Bill Gates changed all that with a real BASIC including
strings and floating point, priced so that real people could afford it. It
revolutionized the small-computer research market.

I had to deal with several of the older monstrosities at NASA-Langley: the
Commodore PET was one I recall, because its GPIB cripplebus connector attracted
lots of sales at Langley. Its BASIC was a monster to deal with, however, and
most experimenters ended up paying the huge extra bucks to get the hp basic
machines.

I really don't know when Gates started selling his interpreter to home computer
manufacturers; the first time I saw it for home use was in the TRS-80 mod I
in the late 70's. One of the things that attracted me to the coco was Microsoft
BASIC -- I had already seen it in some little-known industrial microcomputers
at work. (I bought one of the first NC-board coco I's, although I didn't know
it at the time. 399$ for a 16K ECB computer. What an amazing bargain!-)

As all of us educated people know :-), MSDOS is grounds more for infamy than
fame. When IBM brought out their series 5000 (?) entry-level system, they put
an excellent BASIC -- Gates's -- into the machine, but passed up several
pretty good program loading systems (I can't bring myself to use "operating
system" in conjunction with the PC and Microsoft), such as CP/M and some others
which have since been so deeply buried in the past that I can't bring up any
names, to have him build a thoroughly crippled CP/M knockoff.

Even after ten years, Microsoft was unable to make an operating system out of
MSDOS. Gates & Co. simply never learned how to do low-level system work well.

Even I have to admit, though, that Windows is beginning to look fairly decent.
And its user interface is really elegant (crouching to ward off the blast
that's coming:-).

        --john perry