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Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
spacehobo@teh.entar.net ("Space Hobo") wrote:
@siliconundergro I feel like this story got mis-told for decades, removing the real triumph that occurred.
Gates ported a subset of Dartmouth BASIC to the Altair, sure. Although the review from the Altair users was "this is a pretty weak BASIC. Kinda mid." And yeah, they didn't have the rights to the tapes, which was kind of a surprise to the user groups when they saw that letter. Like, twist my arm telling me not to share this mediocre software.
So what was the ACTUAL response? They wrote an architecture for everyone to write their OWN BASICs in much less code and with more room for individual experimentation, and started a magazine to collaborate on this, and possibly even coined the term #CopyLeft to describe their efforts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC