More: https://harvardmagazine.com/2013/09/walter-isaacson-on-bill-gates-at-harvard
Because they did not have an Altair to work on, Allen had to emulate one on the PDP-10 mainframe at the Aiken Lab. So they bought a manual for the 8080 microprocessor and within weeks Allen had the simulator and other development tools ready.
Meanwhile, Gates was furiously writing the BASIC interpreter code on yellow legal pads. “I can still see him alternately pacing and rocking for long periods before jotting on a yellow legal pad, his fingers stained from a rainbow of felt-tip pens,” Allen recalled. “Once my simulator was in place and he was able to use the PDP-10, Bill moved to a terminal and peered at his legal pad as he rocked. Then he’d type a flurry of code with those strange hand positions of his, and repeat. He could go like that for hours at a stretch.”
One night they were having dinner at Currier House, sitting at the table with the other math geeks, and they began complaining about facing the tedious task of writing the floating-point math routines, which would give the program the ability to deal with both very small and very large numbers in scientific notation. A curly-haired kid from Milwaukee named Monte Davidoff piped up, “I’ve written those types of routines.” It was the benefit of being at Harvard. Gates and Allen began peppering him with questions about his capacity to handle floating-point code. Satisfied they knew what he was talking about, they brought him to Gates’s room and negotiated a fee of $400 for his work. He became the third member of the team, and would eventually earn a lot more.
Thanks,
I now have a better insight into Bill Gates and his contributions. Somewhere along the way, and after talking to others who claimed to have known him, I got the impression he was someone who happened to be at the right place at the right, but not the technical genius behind MicroSoft. Thanks for your comments.
P.S. I still think Windoze sucks...