What if Bill Gates Really Does Know Something the Rest of Us Don't?

Commonsense | 10/20/21 | Charlesoconnell

[Two Kids' Dad]

Must. Buy. Pork. Rinds.

[fireman15]

Like Larry Ellison, Gates actually did some real coding back in the day. He contributed to the original Microsoft Basic and wrote code for a TRS-80 handheld, among other things.

It is often said that both he and Paul Allen were good at programming, unlike the relationship between Wozniak and Jobs. There are some good books about the founding and growth of Microsoft.

I had a TRS-80 handheld and fooled around with it quite a bit... there was not much software available for it. If you wanted it to be useful you had to "code" for it. This is how it was in the beginning of the "home computer" era. I knew quite a few people who were pretty good at programming back then. Some of them actually went to work for microsoft and did very well for themselves.

In this time period "software" was often distributed in magazine articles and books. When you had to type in a program it was a good education as to how the program actually worked. I have a bunch of magazines and books filled with programs for various home computers that were both for educating and for useful purposes. In the beginning I would type them in and save the programs on cassette tapes.