Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

re: Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

RichB — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:37:00 GMT

I don't want to let history get rewritten - Monte Davidoff had a big hand in the original Altair BASIC too.

See http://www.alluvialsw.com/about.html

re: Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

Norman Diamond — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 02:27:00 GMT

> Trivia: Microsoft's corporate switchboard
> number 425-882-8080 is an homage to the
> Altair

The last time I looked at Intel's corporate switchboard number it also ended in 8080, but it wasn't a tribute to the Altair, it was a tribute to one of the makers of a small component used in the Altair.

I also met the man whose phone number ended in 8086. His book and his Ph.D. thesis had nothing to do with hardware and no special relationship to Intel chips, but I neglected to ask what brought about that illustrious phone number.

Hmmmmm. By the way, does anyone know if the IBM z-series still uses the same ABEND codes that OS/360 used? If it does, that's 40 years. When the trusty little "IEBGENER" program (IBM's version of the Copy command but with fewer features) abended with 0C4 (one of IBM's kinds of access violation), no one believed me until I showed them.

re: Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

mike — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 03:13:00 GMT

I suppose it would be cranky to point out that in 30 years, error messages haven't gotten all that much more helpful. "Bad file mode" indeed. :-)

re: Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

Tim Smith — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 04:12:00 GMT

LOL... Good to see that old error 9 is still the "BS" error. I remember that from my old Co-Co days.

Memories, from the corner of my mind...

Microsoft's 30 Years of Backwards Compatibility

Joe Grossberg — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 01:45:00 GMT

Some of the error codes in VBScript date back to the days when Bill Gates and Paul Allen were the...

re: Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

Ian Griffiths — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:15:00 GMT

Rich, Monte Davidoff wrote the maths package, so strictly speaking it is correct to attribute the error codes to Bill and Paul.

By the way, if you follow the link through to the interview about BASIC on The Register's web site, you'll see there's a link to another article discussing the Altair BASIC source code.

In that article it mentions that two guys named Ian Griffiths (that would be me) and Reuben Harris dug up the code and did some reverse engineering of it. So not only was I aware that Monte Davidoff wrote the maths package, I went to look at the archived copy of the source code in Harvard a few years ago...

The Register article is a little misleading - Reuben did all of the actual reverse engineering work, not me.

Sadly, the link to his work in that article is now defunct. But you can find it temporarily here: http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/altair/ and the page specifically linked to by The Register is here: http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/altair/other%20versions/ian.htm

Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

Jackie Goldstein's Weblog — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 03:41:00 GMT

Microsoft is nothing if not consistent

Notes from Classy's Kitchen — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 14:15:00 GMT

OK, they're not really consistent - but at least their BASIC error codes are....

re: How did MS-DOS report error codes?

The Old New Thing — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 19:45:00 GMT

re: Microsoft MVPs revolt (over VB vs. VB.Net)

.NET Brain Droppings — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 05:15:00 GMT

re: Thirty Years of Backwards Compatibility

James Shea — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 10:35:01 GMT

Most of the Z/OS abend codes '0c4, 0c1, oc7' date back to 360 machines era 'which btw does not mean 60's machines' but that the machnes perform for an entire 360 degreee circle of computing functons, which puts them near 50 years old. What is a S0C4? Keeping your feet warm.

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