Sadly nothing in Scott's blog post about how they obtained the source. Was it still in Microsoft's archives? Did they happen upon some tractor-feed print-outs they had to type in by hand?
bdcravens•4m ago
I assume today typing in by hand is no longer needed, with text parsing from images being table stakes for LLMs.
chihuahua•3m ago
It would also be interesting why it was open-sourced now. I assume if they had done the same last year, the resulting loss of revenue would not have destroyed the plucky little $3.6T upstart.
Smalltalker-80•17m ago
In 1979, I made a program called VisiBase in this BASIC.
It's a visual database modeled after VisiCalc.
That won me a joystick in at a competition by the local computer store. :-)
Still have the source, that works in an Apple 2 emulator. It's 13 K in ASCII (untokenized).
rbanffy•9m ago
Maybe Apple can finally release MacBasic now that Microsoft can no longer stop licensing their Basic to the Apple II family.
amichail•8m ago
Do you think computing history would have been much different if Microsoft made a 6502 Pascal interpreter instead?
xxs•4m ago
Pascal is a lot broader language and won't fit in sub 16KB of ROM (even if you exclude monitor [call-151])
rhdunn•30m ago
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypFbtuVMUVXN...
BeefySwain•20m ago