
Loading Microsoft 4K BASIC on ALTAIR 8800 with Papertape - mmastrac
http://just8bits.blogspot.com/2017/03/doing-it-in-less-than-bill-gates.html
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robterrell
That's awesome. I remember flipping switching on the front of a BYTE-8
computer to input the boot loader for the paper-tape reader. 8-year-old me
would have killed for fewer bytes. I don't recall anything as small as 20
bytes though... it was definitely 40 or 50 bytes.

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anonymousiam
There's a nice article about the source code here:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/13/raiders_of_the_lost...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/13/raiders_of_the_lost_altair/)

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MrTonyD
Hey, I remember those days. Wasn't there a 2K basic before that - and an
"unlabeled" one before that? I remember an article at the time - with "Palo
Alto Tiny Basic" actually listed in source format. It was generally agreed
that Bill Gates simply copied that Basic from the magazine and started selling
it on paper tape. Somebody at the time even did a comparison, and found that
the tape was almost identical to the code in the magazine article. Should we
be surprised? Another billionaire getting rich on the work of others.

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kryptiskt
Palo Alto Tiny Basic was published a year (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Chen_Wang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-
Chen_Wang)) after Microsoft's Altair BASIC was available.

