What stands out to me about Gates and Allen is the serious technical chops. Writing an emulator for the PDP-10 and then an interpreter, line editor, I/O system all in 4KB of memory. The code is worth reading and in addition to that they had a very solid business sense and pretty serious work ethic for people who were 20 years old.

It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make it", "if it works you shipped too late" hustle culture that took hold of the industry, with entire products just being API wrappers. Really hope we see more companies that start out like Microsoft again.

To be fair they definitely faked it, they said they had source code for a program they hadn't even written yet! They were just also very serious about the "making it" part.

> It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make it"

They are the all-time greatest in fake-it-til-you-make-it. They got the IBM PC OS contract without having an OS, which they bought from someone else (iirc).

> What stands out to me about Gates and Allen is the serious technical chops. Writing an emulator for the PDP-10 and then an interpreter, line editor, I/O system all in 4KB of memory.

Is that really so impressive? Everything then was in 4K, from all coders.

IMO although it was complex, the human brain could still manage the complexity back then. Reading Woz's autobiography, it feels he knew what every logic gate on the original Apple computer did.

The PDP-10 probably worked at "human speed" too...