At 02:42 PM 1/26/99 +1100, Andrew Davie wrote:
>An interesting quote from my ALTAIR BASIC manual...
>"The Software Department is at Ext. 3; and the joint authors of the ALTAIR
>BASIC Interpreter, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff, will be glad
>to assist you."
>So, where is Monte these days? I haven't heard of him before.
He's mentioned in the "An Open Letter to Hobbyists", dated 2/3/76:
| Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to
| expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the
| initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of
| the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC.
I also found references to him as an co-author of "format_pl1", a
PL/I formatting program, and also worked on PL/I itself and Multics'
"transaction processing" features. He was apparently a fellow
Harvard student with Gates and Allen.
Monte N. Davidoff is one of the "Multicians," a programmer responsible
for some part of the MULTICS operating system. He may be reachable
at <mnd_at_multicians.org>. Other info is at <
http://www.multicians.org/>.
I saw another reference that said he's mentioned briefly in the book
"Programmers at work" by Microsoft Press, in Gates' explanation along
side a reproduction of the first page of the source list of Altair
BASIC, with the quote "Paul Allen and I wrote this, Monte Davidoff
wrote all math stuff." An excerpt is below.
He's also mentioned on page 77 and 78 of "Hard Drive", said another
reference.
All this was gathered by a few minutes searching with www.dejanews.com
and www.hotbot.com, with the string "Monte Davidoff". I know, it's
far easier to enter a message that says "I wonder what happened to
him," and wait for the oracles to whisper the answer. :-)
- John
Received on Tue Jan 26 1999 - 09:14:07 GMT