Source Control - by Babbage - The Chip Letter
‘Source Code’ is the first volume of Bill Gates’s memoirs, covering his life up to 1978. That means his family, his childhood, his education, and the early years of Microsoft with a particular focus on the development, launch and success of Microsoft’s first product Microsoft BASIC.
Accompanying the book has come the release of the source code for (a version of) the very first Microsoft BASIC running on the Intel 8080-based Altair 8800. I say ‘source code’ but it’s really a (100MB!!) PDF file and is linked to by a flashy landing page on Gates’s website (so flashy that it crashes some web browsers!).
Gates has left it to others though to convert the PDF’s images into machine readable (and emulator friendly) code and there doesn’t seem to be a successful conversion so far (please let me know if you’ve found one).
What to make of ‘Source Code’ the book though? It’s helpful to divide it into two halves. The first is largely about Gates’s family, upbringing, time at school and very earliest dabbling with computers. It ends with the death, in a mountaineering accident in May 1972, of Gates’s close friend Kent Evans.
