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Re: The Palo Alto Tea Party




On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Peter L. Peres wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Nov 1998, Ira Abramov wrote:
> 
> > > You mean you drank their coffee and did not check it on a voluntary taster
> > > first ? ;) Tsk, tsk, your vigilance is on the decline ;) ;)
> > 
> > we actually DID kid about it first ("Microsoft Coffee? I wouldn't touch
> > that :-)") but after a few seconds of shock people took it. It was
> > horrible coffee, but wasn't poisoned :-)
> 
> 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.
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.

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...

-- 
Ira Abramov          (°-               L I N U X              -°)
whois: IA58          //\                                      /\\
www.scso.com         v_/_ Because a 486 is too good to waste _\_v