Penguin Powered: Monte Davidoff

Here is a quote and some history bits about and from Monte Davidoff who did the floating point stuff when he, Paul Allen and bad Billy G. wrote a BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair, arguably the first widely available microcomputer software in the mid-seventies and surely the first Micro-Soft product:

Although he helped put the fledgling Micro-Soft on the map, Davidoff has subsequently worked with Unix for most of his career. Microsoft actually bought into Unix very early on in 1979, but its own AT&T derivative Xenix found few buyers, and it eventually spun the work out to the Xenix authors SCO. And these days, Davidoff runs Linux (Red Hat 6.1) at home.

"I'm really excited about Linux," he says. "Having used Unix all these years and put out professional Unix products, they've done a really good job."

His other passion, he tells us, is Python: "Hats off to them. It's an extremely well designed language. It's object orientated from the get-go. They've really succeeded there," he says, and commends it as the ideal teaching language. That used to be BASIC, of course.

All of this comes from an interview with Monte Davidoff in the Register, UK.

Let us mention, that programming also used to be taught by LOGO. Using BASIC less and LOGO more would have done a lot of good for teaching programming. But, then again, there are reasons, why BASIC is still bigger than Smalltalk and LOGO has all but disappeared.

Let us also mention that despite his youth, Mr. Davidoff had also been a <a href="www.multician.org"l>Multician for Honeywell.

Im nachhinein fanden wir heraus, dass Chris Langreiter dieses ganze Register Interview schon viel früher als wir gefunden und gelinkt hatte (2001-05-15) und zwar unter dem Titel: Was Bill any good at coding?