
Create your own Version of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 - Jaruzel
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=46
======
janwillemb
Slightly off-topic: My mother decided that she had to learn about this
computer stuff too, now that her children were so involved in it. This was in
the late 80's. So she grabbed the manual and started 'computering'. Turned out
she took the BASIC manual by accident. After a while she had a small program
running that printed some numbers on the screen, but she had no idea why she
had to do this or what use this program had. In the end she's still the
computer-person of my parental pair.

~~~
bsharitt
>Turned out she took the BASIC manual by accident.

"Hrm, BASIC. This must be about the basics of computers, sounds like a good
place to start."

~~~
csixty4
"I read the manual on all the DOS, where's the book with all the DON'TS?"

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Shalhoub
"Ric Weiland, Bill Gates and Monte Davidoff at Microsoft wrote MOS 6502 BASIC"
as copied from the source code for BASIC for a PDP-8 ..

[http://www.voteview.com/gates.htm](http://www.voteview.com/gates.htm)

[http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/hasta-la-
vista-p...](http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/hasta-la-vista-
part-1-microsofts-final.html)

------
forgottenacc57
How much money would Microsoft have been paid for basic for a given machine?

~~~
vidarh
According to "Commodore: A company on the edge" by Brian Bagnall, Jack Tramiel
(then CEO of Commodore) stated that Gates originally offered royalties of $3
per copy, but Tramiel claims he answered "I'm already married" and offered to
purchase it outright for $25,000 (some sources give lower numbers).

The license allowed Commodore to make improvements, but did not give Commodore
any improvements Microsoft made - people like Bob Yannes at Commodore at the
time thinks Microsoft basically assumed Commodore would come back asking for
upgrades, and pay them more money, but Tramiel was famously tight with money.

In the end, had Gates managed to get $3 per copy, the C64 alone would have
resulted in somewhere between $45m and $60m of income for Microsoft at a time
when that actually was a lot of money for them.

I believe it was first when they did the Commodore 128 that Commodore
negotiated a new deal with them.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
The Tramiels were notorious for not caring about software infrastructure,
compatibility, and maintenance, to their customer's detriment.

I'm not sure of the details of the deal that Tramiel's Atari Corp signed with
Digital Research when they licensed and ported GEM (a Mac/Lisa-like GUI
framework) and GEMDOS (a spawn of CP/M 68k) for the Atari ST -- but after the
initial port it never received any improvements from DR, though Atari
themselves made some relatively minor changes and bug fixes later. But it was
a potentially very good operating system that failed to improve significantly
until it was too late (Atari hired the author of and acquired a set of open
source Unix-like extensions in the early 90s, but by then the writing was on
the wall for the platform.)

------
bostand
So my first steps into the programming world was guided by Bill Gates?

~~~
digi_owl
MS has been around far longer than most likely know.

Keep in mind that the company started out supplying a Fortran compiler for the
Altair 8800. On paper tape no less.

And their BASIC interpreter was the BASIC to have for a decade or more.

Excel (supposedly the last MS product with actual Gates written code inside)
got started on Apple hardware.

~~~
rskar
>the company started out supplying a Fortran compiler for the Altair 8800

I would suppose maybe at some point they did (not sure on this) but it's long
been my understanding that BASIC was their start.

Per
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft):
Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to
develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.

Per
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800):
The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in
the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine
was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
And as we all know, Altair BASIC is the software about which "An Open Letter
To Hobbyists" was written.

