| ▲ | TMWNN 16 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||
>Writing a BASIC interpreter, with floating point, is much harder. Gates, Allen and other collaborators BASIC was pretty damned good. The floating point routines are Monte Davidoff's work. But yes, Gates and Allen writing Altair BASIC on the Harvard PDP-10 without ever actually seeing a real Altair, then having it work on the first try after laboriously entering it with toggle switches at MITS in Albuquerque, was a remarkable achievement. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | WalterBright 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
What Allen did was write an 8080 emulator that ran on the -10. The 8080 is a simple CPU, so writing an emulator for it isn't hard. https://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html Then, their BASIC was debugged by running it on the emulator. The genius was not the difficulty of doing that, it wasn't hard. The genius was the idea of writing an 8080 emulator. Wozniak, in comparison, wrote Apple code all by hand in assembler and then hand-assembled it to binary, a very tedious and error-prone method. In the same time period, I worked at Aph, and we were developing code that ran on the 6800 and other microprocessors. We used full-fledged macro assemblers running on the PDP-11 to assemble the code into binary, and then download binary into an EPROM which was then inserted into the computer and run. Having a professional macro assembler and text editors on the -11 was an enormous productivity boost, with far fewer errors. (Dan O'Dowd wrote those assemblers.) (I'm doing something similar with my efforts to write an AArch64 code generator. First I wrote a disassembler for it, testing it by generating AArch64 code via gcc, disassembling that with objdump and then comparing the results with my disassmbler. This helps enormously in verifying that the correct binary is being generated. Since there are thousands of instructions in the AArch64, this is a much scaled up version of the 8080.) | |||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | zabzonk 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Allen had to write the loader in machine code, which was toggled in on the Altair console. The BASIC interpreter itself was loaded from paper tape via the loader and a tape reader. The first BASIC program Allen ran on the Altair was apparently "2 + 2", which worked - i.e. it printed "4" I'd like to have such confidence in my own code, particularly the I/O, which must have been tricky to emulate on the Dec10. | |||||||||||||||||
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