This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/microsoft by /u/rkhunter_ on 2025-07-10 20:37:56+00:00.

Finished Source Code… the book mostly focuses on Bill’s life before “Micro-Soft”, his feelings while growing up, relationship with parents, and his time at school and university. There are some interesting facts.

• Due to a lack of knowledge in programming math operations with floating numbers for BASIC on the Altair, Bill and Paul hired another code, a talented math student Monte Davidoff. Later, when Bill first met Steve Wozniak, he learned that Apple’s BASIC didn’t support math operations with floating numbers due to the complexity of implementation.
• At the time they were working on BASIC, MITS didn’t even have a working prototype of the device powered by the Intel 8080 CPU. To overcome this obstacle, Paul wrote an emulator (simulator) for Intel 8080, allowing them to test BASIC on PDP-10.
• While working on BASIC, Bill was in danger of being expelled from Harvard when the university principals found out that the PDP-10 machine, provided by the DoD, was being used with unlimited time at night, despite the high cost of machine time at the Aiken Lab. But what was even more outrageously was that Bill had brought strangers (Paul and Monte) into the lab without approval. But eventually the punishment was not severe for him.
• It also mentioned what was probably one of the first documented cases of software vulnerabilities. Bill reveals how he and Paul Allen discovered a way to gain admin access to DEC’s PDP-10 minicomputer running the TOPS-10 0S by simply typing Ctrl-C twice during login.