No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a <i>scan of paper tape</i>, I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
Even if the source is already transcribed anywhere, I'm interested at what your experience will be if you keep going all the way through. A lot of authors have done things like rewrite Shakespeare plays or famous novels out by hand and claim to have got a lot of the experience of feeling like they were getting into the author's mind and stuff.. I wonder if typing this out could be similarly enlightening.
I don’t want to spoil your efforts, but I think the source is already online: <a href="https://github.com/option8/Altair-BASIC">https://github.com/option8/Altair-BASIC</a>
Nice to see Monte Davidoff's name included at line 69. Already the hierarchy tho'.<p>I picture he and Paul discussing the code he had just written when Bill walks in and asks "Are you done yet?"
Am I alone in thinking that it's revealing that Gates himself hasn't released this as open source? I'm not sure how that would work as presumably the copyright rests with MS and not Gates but I'm sure that he could have found a way.
I was hoping someone would do this!<p>I have been researching/playing around with Macro-10 using the simh PDP-10 emulator just for fun recently. I have always been curious about the inner workings of the 8080 emulator Paul Allen developed for running this code on a "fake" Altair. Maybe this source code could provide some insight into how Micro-Soft went about getting to a fully working BASIC for the Altair step by step from the very beginning.
Trolling or nah? If the author of this link is struggling with spell check and hasn't written assembly language before, this doesn't provide much confidence for an accurate transcription of the source code printout.<p>Good luck on the exercise, though! Don't worry, Bill and his legal team will be watching you closely. They'll be cheering you on (but not for the reasons you think they will be.)
Please read Bill Gates's Letter to Hobbyists and don't do this. He's not going to be happy that people are ripping off his Altair BASIC and not giving him any money. What you're doing is just not fair to him.