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Bill Gates releases source code to Altair Basic, written 50 years ago to launch Microsoft (www.gatesnotes.com)

submitted 1 week ago by troyunrau to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

We didn't have the Intel 8080 chip that the Altair computer ran on, So Paul got to work writing a program that would simulate one on Harvard's PDP-10 mainframe. This allowed us to test our software without needing an actual Altair.

So, basically:

We are going to write a compiler, but first we are going to write a Virtual Machine from scratch because the hardware is too expensive.

Good times.