Just trying to get a handle on the scope of the losses from the two day stock market rout. At $5T for the S&P alone this comes out to almost $15,000 for every man, woman and child in America. And this wasn’t an act of nature or even a bubble popping. It was a result of a policy decision by leaders at the highest level. I don’t see this being recovered any time soon, nor do I see it resulting in any long term gains for the country. And if anyone thinks this is going to have any sort of positive benefits, I would like to see an example of another time a similar huge drop in markets has been in any way a good thing.

S&P 500 loses $5 trillion in two days in Trump tariff selloff

Bill Gates published the source code to his original commercial product, a BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8000 series microprocessor. As a high school student I got my hands on my first computer, a Heathkit H8 owned by my uncle. It ran a Heathkit version of BASIC called Benton Harbor BASIC, named after the town where Heathkit was based in Michigan. But there was a much better BASIC interpreter out there from a little company called Microsoft. I got a hold of a copy and it was a revelation. In my long career there are maybe a half dozen pieces of software that really impressed me. This was the first.

I managed to talk my dad into getting a Heathkit H-89 that I assembled on the family pool table. I immediately got a copy of Microsoft BASIC and I was off to the races. Even wrote a simple video game in Microsoft BASIC that I was able to sell and make a few bucks from. Sure beat mowing lawns.

The H-89 was replaced by newer and faster computers over the years but for some reason I lugged it around with me from city to city for almost 50 years. I also kept the photocopied manual for Microsoft BASIC, something perhaps even more rare than the software itself.

So yeah, I was one of those hobbyists who stole from Bill Gates. Just don’t ask him where he got his code from back in those wild and wooly days. I finally read his letter from 1976 and I’m surprised to see he invites people to send money to his office in Albuquerque. I have just retired to just outside of Albuquerque and will go see what is at that address today. It seems to be in a marginal, if not bad neighborhood. Perhaps it always was. If anyone is there I’ll ask what the tab is on a copy of Microsoft BASIC with 50 years interest. I owe you Bill. I suppose we all do. And hey, nice 8080 assembly. Very high quality stuff, especially for that era. From Gates Notes.

Celebrating 50 Years of Microsoft with the Company’s Original Source Code