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Re: The Palo Alto Tea Party



On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Ira Abramov wrote:

> > Ah, ok. I was scared for a moment that they have managed for the first
> > time in recorded history to produce something bug-free at first trial ;)
> 
> they actually did. Microsoft's very first product was BASIC for an Altair
> 8080. Bill and Paul wrote it on an Emulator they wrote on a PDP machine.

On a PDP machine running UNIX perhaps ? <vbg>

> they printed it on a roll of punched paper and flew to texas to demo it,
> since no Altair machines were yet available in the market, and the very
> first demo went perfectly fine, even though it was actually also the very
> first time they ran it on a real Altair.

Any non-company member witnesses ? <g>
 
> Bill wasn't such a bad programmer in those early days. you have to admit
> that the bad quality of products his company started spewing started when 
> he hired more programmers and concentrated on marketing...

I did not ever say anything about his personal programming skills.  Nor
about the marketing technique. It's the general picture that is so
sinister, not the details ;(

Peter