The Original Microsoft Source Code: Altair BASIC From 1975 Resurfaces
A digitized copy of the original Altair BASIC interpreter source code, written by Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff in 1975, is circulating on Hacker News. The document, hosted on Gates's own site, shows the hand-annotated assembly code that ran on the Altair 8800, one of the first commercially successful microcomputers.
This code is historically significant because it was Microsoft's very first product and helped kick off the personal computer software industry. Written in just a few weeks under tight memory constraints, it crammed a working BASIC interpreter into a machine with only a few kilobytes of RAM.
While there's not much new here beyond the artifact itself, it's a reminder of how far developer tooling has come, and how much ingenuity was required before modern compilers, IDEs, and abundant memory made programming dramatically easier.