It is rare that I say this but, thanks MS! Arguably just as, if not more, important is the BASIC that they wrote. That was what they actually wanted to do. DOS just got them the contract with IBM. For decades MS was really a developer tools company with a side biz of writing operating systems and other misc software. They also open sourced that BASIC code too [1].
[1] https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/03/microsoft-o...
I dont think I've ever seen a commit that says "49 years ago". Damn.
Not quite as old, but brl-cad is still in active development and has commits from 1983. https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad/graphs/contributors?all=1
1968 https://www.netlib.org/go/fft.f
Even the README here is (erroneously?) timestamped as 1978 https://github.com/microsoft/BASIC-M6502
Which is unlikely since it seems to be written by AI
Files in Git don't have timestamps, only commits do. It got swept up when `git commit --date=...` was run.
oh I see. proper archeology would be to have more commits then
It's funny that the .gitignore is marked as being from 49 years ago ...
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
I was confused by the short commit history, and then I checked the branches.
I love that someone went to this effort.
I remember when I realized I had been using Microsoft all along through my Commodore 64.
The Commodore 64 got me started in computers, back when I was in grade school. Countless late nights programming in BASIC. All this time I never knew BASIC was licensed from Microsoft. Thanks!
"Commodore licensed BASIC from Microsoft in 1977 on a 'pay once, no royalties' basis after Jack Tramiel turned down Bill Gates' offer of a $3 per unit fee, stating, 'I'm already married,' and would pay no more than $25,000 for a perpetual license."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC
I still have my C64 (it only needed some capacitors replacing a few years back) from about 1984ish but for me it was just a games machine although I did type in an awful lot of machine code from books later on.
I still remember the ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release) thing and low pass, high pass and band pass for sound and have some unlikely memories about graphics primitives too for a middle aged bloke!
My original Quickshot II still works. You might bear in mind Daley Thompson's Decathlon was popular in the UK back in the day and it was designed to destroy joysticks.
My C64 now has a USB interface ...
What's interesting is that Microsoft BASIC itself was derived from BASIC-PLUS which itself was derived from Dartmouth BASIC (which evolved into a structured programming language called SBASIC (Structured BASIC). But the popularity of Microsoft BASIC, actually halted the standardisation of SBASIC as an ANSI standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC
The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer.[1] The MS dialect is patterned on Digital Equipment Corporation's BASIC-PLUS on the PDP-10, which Gates had used in high school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC
Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. It was designed by two professors at Dartmouth College, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. With the underlying Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), it offered an interactive programming environment to all undergraduates as well as the larger university community.
Dartmouth also introduced a dramatically updated version known as Structured BASIC (or SBASIC) in 1975, which added various structured programming concepts. SBASIC formed the basis of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) "Standard BASIC" efforts in the early 1980s.
In contrast to the Dartmouth compilers, most other BASICs were written as interpreters. This decision allowed them to run in the limited main memory of early microcomputers. Microsoft's Altair BASIC is one example: it was designed to run in only 4 KB of memory (interestingly, it was delivered on paper tape).
Kemeny became involved in an effort to produce an ANSI standard BASIC in an attempt to bring together the many small variations of the language that had developed through the late 1960s and early 1970s. This effort initially focused on a system known as Minimal BASIC that was similar to earliest versions of Dartmouth BASIC, while later work was aimed at a Full BASIC that was essentially SBASIC with various extensions.
But by the late 1980s, tens of millions of home computers were running some variant of the MS BASIC interpreter. It had become the de facto standard for BASIC, which eventually led to the abandonment of the ANSI SBASIC efforts.
Kemeny and Kurtz, however, decided to continue their efforts to introduce the concepts from SBASIC and the ANSI Standard BASIC efforts. This became True BASIC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_BASIC
There are versions of the True BASIC compiler for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Classic Mac OS. At one time, versions for TRS-80 Color Computer, Amiga and Atari ST computers were offered, as well as a UNIX command-line compiler.
After several years of inactivity, as of February 2026, the TrueBASIC website is officially closed.
Ah, the good ol’ “Embrace, Extend, … Extinguish”
lmao
Nit: the pdp-10 is generally considered a mainframe not a minicomputer.
They had a working PDP-10 at the Living Computers Museum (since shut down by Paul Allen's estate). Definitely a mainframe. That thing takes up an entire room.