Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)(www.pagetable.com)
129 pointsby michalpleban3 days ago11 comments
  • csl3 days ago
    An excellent article. Bill Gates himself posted a comment: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43#comment-1033
    • RetroTechie3 days ago
      Nice! From that comment:

      "There were a lot of interesting versions of BASIC done for Japanese machines this article misses (..)"

      Most likely referring to MSX-Basic. Which shows it's (c) Microsoft on the startup screen.

      Not the fastest, but a very full-featured Basic compared to most Basics around @ the time. Iirc it does non-integer math on BCD coded values. Single & double precision, so users can decide RAM use/speed/precision tradeoffs.

      Maybe there were other Japanese machines using MS-supplied Basics before that. But if so, likely few (any?) after MSX was introduced ('83), since that was big in Japan leaving little room for 8-bit competitors.

      • dhosek3 days ago
        My very first computer was a Spectravideo MSX computer which I got in exchange for writing some demo programs for the midwest distributor for the company. Fun little machine, although I still preferred Apple in general.
    • qingcharles3 days ago
      What do you think his hn username is? :)
  • dang3 days ago
    Related. Others?

    Bill Gates' Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30110068 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)

  • asadm3 days ago
    I have a question, can something like this survive in today's world? or have the disassembling tools now too advanced to easily wipe something like this when cloning.
    • omoikane3 days ago
      It sounds like you are asking whether anti-cloning or anti-piracy measures would survive in today's world, and that's something of an ugly arms race. The publishers know whatever scheme they put in will eventually be defeated, but most of them just want to deter piracy for a limited period after the release date.

      The Microsoft easter egg is from an earlier era where things aren't so ugly. The Cutting Room Floor has more easter eggs of that nature, for example:

      https://tcrf.net/Super_Tetris_3

      Also try searching for "hidden copyright".

  • cookie_monsta2 days ago
    Oh how dreary. I was hoping for something fun and whimsical but it's just IP protection...
  • gitroom2 days ago
    nice, always blows my mind how much history is packed into old computers and all the random stories. i geek out over this stuff tbh.
  • amelius3 days ago
    If you copy someone's code, always add a bunch of easter eggs saying the code belongs to company X, Y and Z. Then nobody else can claim it as their own.
  • anthk2 days ago
    On the Altair Basic, good achievement; but giving how fast Forth was, I'd guess that using a fixed point and a optional floating point for a 8800 machine it would send Basic to NUL.
  • OpenLoong3 days ago
    interesting!
  • neuroelectron2 days ago
    "I stole this and put my name on it first"
  • ilrwbwrkhv3 days ago
    Bill gates is the only remaining hacker one can look upto. Yes he was ruthless but also the amount of work he did for humanity was orders of magnitude more than others.

    The current crop of rich folks are really the wrong uns and come from a deep history of bad families. Rotten blood really shows.

    • chasil3 days ago
      What is interesting to consider is if Dave Cutler had not been available or otherwise did not choose Microsoft in 1988.

      Would Microsoft have adapted BSD NET/1 as Apple eventually did, instead of continuing OS/2?

      • Keyframe2 days ago
        What's interesting is that Cutler said in an interview that initially he talked to Gates but wasn't interested until Ballmer swayed him in.

        with a few minutes of pretext: https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=3224

    • indigodaddy3 days ago
      One of my favorite past times is reading different Bill Gates biographies. They never get old. Right now actually just started reading the one he actually wrote recently. It's excellent so far.
      • predictsoft3 days ago
        Or Paul Allen in Accidental Zillionaire.
    • protocolture2 days ago
      >Bill gates is the only remaining hacker one can look upto.

      Assuming Bill gates is the only hacker you are aware of.

    • saagarjha2 days ago
      You can also just look up to normal people who are better than Bill Gates, even if they're not as rich as him.
    • Teever3 days ago
      "The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place."
    • 3 days ago
      undefined
    • sitkack3 days ago
      His wife did divorce him due to his involvement with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein

      https://www.today.com/news/bill-melinda-gates-divorce-linked...

      The body language analysis [2-3] of the PBS News Hour Interview [1] is quite something.

      [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgVcFv_tWs

      [2] Bill Gates was BLINDSIDED by Jeffrey Epstein question https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwAk3797Bn0

      [3] Communication Professor Reacts to Bill Gates Interview on PBS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79ExQWKb2vA

    • anthk2 days ago
      Bill? The one from Halloween Documents? Richard Stallman among the reaining Scheme, Common Lisp, Lisp Machines, Forth and UXN hackers are the ONLY remaining ones.

      Everything else has no clue what's babbling about.

  • jojo142 days ago
    I wouldn't call that an easter egg. IMHO it's rather a backdoor. A covert method to gain access to information about the system. Indeed what is the benefit to the user? No need to feed the mythology about BG. He was not a developer. Period.
    • jodrellblank2 days ago
      No need to try and rewrite history just because you hate M$ or whatever.
      • jojo142 days ago
        I don't hate Micro-soft however I like the truth. Do you know the BASIC was open source ? Wikipedia is your friend.
        • jodrellblank2 days ago
          Do you know Bill Gates claimed to program Fortran? [1]

          Did you know Joel Spolsky who co-founded StackOverflow and used to project manage Excel at Microsoft described Bill Gates[2] as "amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer." ?

          Did you know Raymond Chen of The Old New Thing blog recounted the story[3] "During the development of Windows 3.0, it was customary to have regular meetings with Bill Gates to brief him on the status of the project. At one of the reviews, the topic was performance, and Bill complained, “You guys are spending all this time with your segment tuning tinkering. I could teach a twelve-year-old to segment-tune. I want to see some real optimization, not this segment tuning nonsense. I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake.” (I can’t believe I had to write this: This is a dramatization, not a courtroom transcript.) This “I wrote FAT on an airplane” line was apparently one Bill used when he wanted to complain that what other people was doing wasn’t Real Programming. But this time, the development manager decided she’d had enough. “Fine, Bill. We’ll set you up with a machine fully enlisted in the Windows source code, and you can help us out with some of your programming magic, why don’t you.”"

          which, while dramatization, puts Bill Gates in a light where he could code and multiple people knew it and believed it. Compare with another Joel Spolsky comment "the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products. Put Jim Manzi (the suit who let the MBAs take over Lotus) in that meeting and he would be staring blankly. “What’s a rich text edit control?” It never would have occurred to him to take technological leadership because he didn’t grok the technology"

          Age 13 he wrote code / debugged for 'Computer Center Corp.' sneaking out to do it[4]

          This is multiple people making multiple different but connected claims about someone who founded one of the world's biggest software companies - he claims that he codes, other people claim that he codes, other people call him amazingly technical, other people find it plausible that he was criticising code performance in technical ways and gate(s)keeping 'real programming' as something he did and others weren't doing. You "like the truth" what evidence do you have other than you saying "period"?

          [1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Early-Days-as-a-Computer-Programm...

          [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

          [3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20131008-00/?p=30...

          [4] https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/business/money-report/at-age...