On Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 4:43:11 AM UTC-4, Mr Emmanuel Roche, France wrote:
> Guy Macon <http://www.GuyMacon.com/> wrote:
> > I have a question: what is the earliest written-by-Bill-Gates
> > original-source-not-a-later-disassembly BASIC that *is* available?
> 1) Guy Macon is a well-known spammer. Let's hope he will go back to
> Hell!
> 2) Answer (for others): None. Bill Gates never wrote Altair BASIC.
> According to the listing (whose photocopy was published in a
> Microsoft Press Book), Paul Allen wrote all the BASIC interpreter
> while Bill Gates was a student at Harvard (Paul Allen was a
> professional programmer, him). After MITS swallowed the hook,
> they both went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Bill Gates
> wrote the I/O subroutines. A good third of the program was the
> Floating-Point math package, written by Monte Davidoff.
> Again, all this is written, black on white, on the listing.
> (You will also notice that, in MITS "Computer Connections"
> Bill Gates always talk about the I/O subroutines, never about
> the details of the BASIC interpreter. It is Paul Allen who explains
> what is or not available.)
> Yours Sincerely,
> Mr. Emmanuel Roche, France

I just wanted to let everyone know that Mr. Emmanuel Roche is wrong. The book, on page 70, indeed shows the first page of the listing of Altair 4K BASIC. The credits are as follows (including the line numbers):

00470 BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
00480 PAUL ALLEN WROTE OTHER STUFF.
00490 MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE.

The book shows version 4.44. Version 1.1 also credits Gates as can be seen here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#/media/File:Altair_Basic_Sign.jpg

"00580 BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF."

On 17/02/2023 7:40 am, Gerard J. wrote:
>
> I just wanted to let everyone know that Mr. Emmanuel Roche is wrong. The book, on page 70, indeed shows the first page of the listing of Altair 4K BASIC. The credits are as follows (including the line numbers):

Gates is famous for being the nerd who built a business empire and amassed
a fortune. Being first to sell a working BASIC to Ed Roberts no doubt helped
(allegedly Roberts was getting several calls a day from people claiming to
have a BASIC 'nearly ready'). More interesting is what, if anything, was new
about Gates' BASIC. If all the elements pre-existed, then perhaps not a lot.

In article <tsmkhl$3djcl$1@dont-email.me>,
dxforth <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:
> On 17/02/2023 7:40 am, Gerard J. wrote:
>>
>> I just wanted to let everyone know that Mr. Emmanuel Roche is wrong. The book, on page 70, indeed shows the first page of the listing of Altair 4K BASIC. The credits are as follows (including the line numbers):
>
> Gates is famous for being the nerd who built a business empire and amassed
> a fortune. Being first to sell a working BASIC to Ed Roberts no doubt helped
> (allegedly Roberts was getting several calls a day from people claiming to
> have a BASIC 'nearly ready'). More interesting is what, if anything, was new
> about Gates' BASIC. If all the elements pre-existed, then perhaps not a lot.

I don't know about the earliest Gates/Microsoft BASIC, but by the time
of what came with my Osborne 1, it was an interpreter but tokenized,
where each reserved word was a byte with the high order bit on, and
some other things that internalized it enough to make interpretation
faster. Some googling may find an MBASIC program that can (with
minor adjustment for where in RAM the user program starts) list itself
without using LIST, by PEEKing through RAM from that starting point,
and printing a detokenized representation of itself.

Contrast that with CBASIC descended from BASIC-E (the latter by one of
the service academies, if memory serves) that had a separate BASIC to
byte code compiler program vs byte code interpreter that actually ran
it. Microsoft BASIC was definitely easier to use, although CBASIC may
have had some desirable features or performance advantage, which would
be way more than I remember.

So if Microsoft BASIC was easier (didn't need separate editor and two
more commands to compile and run), it might have had the advantage of
more people being willing to use it.