Altair Basic Interpreter Source Code (1975) [pdf]

(images.gatesnotes.com)

37 points by Eridanus23 hours ago

5 comments

davidfekke2 hours ago
Here is the 6502 assembly source code for Microsoft Basic:<a href="https://github.com/microsoft/BASIC-M6502" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/BASIC-M6502</a>
piker2 hours ago
These two guys* were crazy productive in the 2 months they worked. Just the level of commenting shows how much thought they were able to give it during that span.* plus the math package guy
- jll291 hour ago
 Does the code work?I.e., has anyone OCR'd the listing and fed it into an emulator yet?
thrownawaysz2 hours ago
"FILE WILL BE DELETED AFTER PRINTING"hah I've never seen that before but reminds me to roguelike games."permadeath coding" would be actually fun. IF compiler error THEN erase code repository or something like this
- teddyh1 hour ago
 Kent Beck called this “test && commit || revert” in 2018, and credits Oddmund Strømme for the idea: <<a href="https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/test-commit-revert-870bbd756864" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/test-commit-revert-870bbd7...</a>>
- WillAdams1 hour ago
 Or, just buy the source for a dollar and bury it:<a href="https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html</a>
- bitwize1 hour ago
 The source code (and original assets) to many video games from as late as the 90s has been lost. The publishing company often deleted it after the game shipped, thinking it just took up space. This is one reason why, for example, there hasn't been a substantive remaster of Final Fantasy VII.Also, it sounds like you described Vigil: <a href="https://github.com/munificent/vigil" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/munificent/vigil</a>
 - reaperducer49 minutes ago
 The publishing company often deleted it after the game shipped, thinking it just took up space.Floppy disks were not cheap, expensive, easy to get, or reliable. It sucked.Even on the U.S. east coast, I remember having to travel over an hour to get to the nearest store that sold floppy disks. Each BASF FlexyDisk cost $18 in 2026 money. So $50 if you wanted redundant long-term storage of one program.That's why we printed everything out all the time; especially for archive storage.…which also turned out to be a bad idea. Just in a different way.
joebig1 hour ago
And all of it within ~4 Kbytes too!
ChrisArchitect1 hour ago
Associated blog post from 2025:Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's original Source code<a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code" rel="nofollow">https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code</a>(Discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575884">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575884</a>)
- joebig1 hour ago
 Gates plays the long game. The man dodged multiple requests over decades to publish this og code that launched MS as a company (pretended he had misplaced the same or forgot to reply or something): only to perfectly time it for a jubilee release.