Daniel Robbins hired by M$

[Christopher Browne]

On 6/14/05, James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Alex Beamish wrote:
> > On 6/14/05, James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> >>Also, he developed his BASIC on Harvard computers, despite a prohibition
> >>on using those computers for commercial purposes.  In short, he stole
> >>other people's code, stole computer time, and then tried to keep
> >>everything for himself.  Hardly open source.
> >
> > I'm not as familiar with how the code was developed, however,
> > university is a place for learning, and it could be that his work
> > could have morphed into some kind of undergraduate project.
> >
> > This raises an interesting question .. did Hardvard ever go after
> > young Mr. Gates for compensation if it was proven that he used the
> > computers to develop his Altair BASIC?
> 
> I read about this in a book about the history of modern computers.
> IIRC, Harvard didn't do anything, other than tighten up their policies.
>  Also, as I recall, he started work on BASIC, after he promised it to Ed
> Roberts at Altair.  Also, at that time BASIC was a teaching language and
> the source would have been available to students.  I wonder how much of
> that was "borrowed" by Sir Billy?  Back in those days, source code was
> routinely made available.

It is not at all obvious that the source code for language compilers
was "routinely made available," certainly not for the mainframe-based
timesharing systems commonly used back in those days.

When I used sundry FORTRAN compilers on VM/CMS, I never had access to
source code, whether I was working with FORTH (IBM's "version H") or
WATFOR (the WatCom compiler typically used by students because it
didn't do so much optimizing and thus ran faster).

And the early BASIC compilers out of Dartmouth were unlikely to be
available in source code form.

Furthermore, there wouldn't be much for Billy to get out of a
Dartmouth compiler when he was writing what amounted to a bytecode
interpreter for a completely different language.

The "Micro Soft Level 1 BASIC" bears about as much resemblance to the
BASIC of Kemeny and Kurtz as a some first-year student's hack of a
Scheme implementation written in Awk would to a full ANSI Common LISP
implementation

There were, in general terms, three versions of Microsoft's BASICs,
back in those days...  There was "Level 1", which was exceedingly
primitive.  Level 2 was what a lot of people started programming with
whether on TRS-80s, Apples, or IBM PCs.  Level 3 had some "holy grail"
stuff going on, but wasn't available in time to be interesting...

At any rate, Microsoft's versions of BASIC were long interpreted, not
compiled, and were never nearly compatible with any of the ANSI
standards, which would make it highly unlikely that there would have
been any useful code to be had from a Dartmouth compiler...
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