  --------- ---- -- ---- ----- --- ---- -----
  COPYRIGHT 1975 BY BILL GATES AND PAUL ALLEN
  --------- ---- -- ---- ----- --- ---- -----
  
  ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM
  FEBRUARY 9 TO  APRIL 9 1975
  
  BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
  PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.

According to Paul Allen's book [1] about his time at Microsoft (admittedly a biased source), his particularly critical contribution was an 8088 emulator/simulator for the PDP-10. That allowed them to write and even interactively debug (if I remember right) BASIC for the 8088 on the PDP. It would've been hopeless to develop directly on a microcomputer, so they would've had to have written on the minicomputer, transferred the binary across and see if it worked, and iterate like that.

That contribution wouldn't show up directly in the BASIC source code, since the emulator wasn't part of BASIC itself.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Idea-Man-Memoir-Co-founder-Microsof...

scionthefly

So I might be able to use a PiDP-11 microcomputer, presuming it is compatible with thd PDP-10, to run an 8088 emulator, on which I could run early DOS programs?

aidenn0

PDP-11 and PDP-10 are completely different. The 11 was in the DEC 16-bit series and the 10 was in the DEC 36-bit series.

cbm-vic-20

While this is completely true, the PiDP-11 mentioned by the parent is based on SimH, which does simulate PDP-10 (as well as dozens of other early systems).

[1] https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11 [2] https://github.com/simh/simh