Altair Basic Source Code
Bill Gates (via Slashdot):
It feels like just yesterday that Paul and I were hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard’s computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company.
That code remains the coolest code I’ve ever written to this day—and you can see it for yourself at the bottom of this page.
[…]
Paul and I set out to create a BASIC interpreter, which would translate code into instructions the computer understood line by line as the program runs.
[…]
Paul and I decided to divide and conquer. We didn’t have the Intel 8080 chip that the Altair computer ran on, so Paul got to work writing a program that would simulate one on Harvard’s PDP-10 mainframe. This allowed us to test our software without needing an actual Altair. Meanwhile, I focused on writing the main code for the program while another friend, Monte Davidoff, worked on a portion called the math package. We coded day and night for the two months to create the software we had said already existed.
The source code is provided as a 157-page PDF [link] of scanned fan-fold paper rather than as source in a convenient repository. An annotated disassembly of Altair BASIC 3.2 can be found on GitHub.
Previously:
