Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)

Summary

If you type “WAIT6502,1” into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever tried to claim that the code wasn’t from Microsoft”. In this episode of “Computer Archeology“, we will not only examine this story, but also track down the history of Microsoft BASIC on various computers, and see see how Microsoft added a second easter egg to the TSR-80 Color Computer – because they had forgotten about the first one. Stolen From Apple? This whole story sounds similar to Apple embedding a “Stolen From Apple” icon into the Macintosh firmware in 1983, so that in case a cloner copies the ROM, in court, Steve Jobs could hit a few keys on the clone, revealing the icon and proving that not just a “functional mechanism” was copied but instead the whole software was copied verbatim. Altair BASIC Let’s dig into the history of Microsoft’s BASIC interpreters. In 1975, Microsoft (back then still spelled “Micro-soft”) released Altair BASIC, a 4 KB BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8080-based MITS Altair 8800, which, despite all its other limitations, included a 32 bit floating point library. An extended version (BASIC-80) that consisted of 8 KB of code contained extra instructions and functions, and, most importantly, support for strings. Microsoft BASIC for the 6502 In 1976, MOS Technology launched the KIM-1, an evaluation board based around the new 6502 CPU from the same company. Microsoft converted their BASIC for the Intel 8080 to run on the 6502, keeping both the architecture of the interpreter and its data structures the same, and created two versions: an 8 KB version with a 32 bit floating point library (6 digits), and a 9 KB system with 40 bit floating point support (9 digits). Some sources claim that, while BASIC for the 8080 was 8 KB in size, Microsoft just could...