SPEAKER: What you have here is a listing of an early piece of software
written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft.
The code is interesting for two reasons.
First of all, it became Microsoft's first product,
which was an interpreter for the basic programming language.
>> And secondly, this was one of the first attempts
to create an interpreter so ordinary people could use personal computers.
So, bill gates was an undergraduate at Harvard.
I started teaching at Harvard 1974.
This was done in 1975.
>> So, it was early in his career in early in my career.
I actually taught Bill in a course around this time.
Paul Allen was not a Harvard student, but he
had been a high school classmate of Bill Gates.
If you come and look at the listing, you'll
actually find a third name, Monte Davidoff,
who was Gates's classmate here at Harvard.
>> Here's an interesting comment up here.
It says "in 4k can delete square root but for loops should still work."
So what that means is that there was two ways to compile this program.
One was to run on a version of this Altair computer
that only had 4k words of memory, 4,096 words of memory.
>> But the big version had 8k.
And so what this says that in the 4k version
you had to delete some code to make it fit.
And one of the things that would be deleted
would be the square root routine.
But apparently the for loops should still
work even when you were compiling down for just
the 4k version of the computer.