Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC

VBTeam

Another entry in the annals of BASIC history today…. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat down for an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital for the D5 conference. One of the highlights of the video is recalling the agreement Apple struck with Microsoft for a version of BASIC which supported floating point numbers.  Apparently, Steve begged Steve Wozniak to implement such a version of BASIC, eventually licensed a version that supported floating point numbers from Microsoft, and then released it as Applesoft BASIC in 1979. Watching them tell the story is like having your parents tell you how they met – kind of gross, but endearing.

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