(Credit: Gates Notes)
Ahead of Microsoft's 50th anniversary this week, co-founder Bill Gates has released the company's original source code.
Gates and Paul Allen wrote it in BASIC using a PDP-10 mainframe at Harvard. Gates has now published a 157-page PDF of scanned, yellowed pages for all to see. "That code remains the coolest code I've written to this day," Gates says on his blog. "I still get a kick out of seeing it, even all these years later."
Gates and Allen were inspired to write the code by a 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured an Altair 8800. (PC Magazine wasn't founded until 1982, or surely that would have inspired him, too!) "When Paul and I saw that cover, we knew two things: the PC revolution was imminent, and we wanted to get in on the ground floor," Gates writes.
The two wrote a letter to the company that made the personal computer, MITS, claiming they had a version of BASIC that could run on it. That was not true, so they had to build it themselves.
The computer could not "speak" BASIC, so they created a BASIC interpreter to translate the code into something it could understand and act on. Another problem was they didn't have the Intel 8080 chip the Altair ran on. So, Allen wrote a program to simulate it on the PDP-10. They worked for two months on it, alongside a third friend, Monte Davidoff.
Gates charts the origins of Altair BASIC in more detail in his new book, Source Code, which he discussed in an interview with our editor-in-chief earlier this year.
"Before Office, Windows 95, or Xbox, Microsoft began with this code," a Microsoft spokesperson tells us.
You can't do much with the PDF released by Gates; it's even too "basic" for ChatGPT, which couldn't understand the document when we uploaded it. "No text could be extracted from this file," it said. It's more of a nostalgic look back at Microsoft's humble beginnings. As The Register notes, however, an annotated disassembly of Altair BASIC 3.2 is available on GitHub.