Paul G. Allen wrote: > James E. Henderson wrote: > >> Even before DOS, Micro-Soft had a BASIC interpreter they developed >> from a public domain research project into proprietary software using >> "borrowed" time on a mainframe system. Their BASIC ran under the CP/M >> operating system developed by Digital Research, a company Micro-Soft >> soon destroyed. >> > > The story goes that Bill Gates stole BASIC from someone in a university > he attended. So, apparently, M$ didn't event write any of their versions > of BASIC.
Well, that sounds different from what recall -- that the initial basic was in fact the product of a decent programming effort on the part of our friend Bill (and maybe Paul). Don't know about possible incorporation or conversion of other people's code afterwards. They had quite a decent macro-assembler and a reasonable c-compiler for the CPM environment. Then came the PC, and the world changed. I believe they essentially replaced their own 808x C-compiler with a competitor they bought out - what was their name. again? > > Wish I could find the link I once had showing the history of M$ products. How about: http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm which is consistent with what I remember. Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
