Monte Davidoff

Harvard undergraduate who wrote the floating-point math package for the original 1975 Microsoft/Altair BASIC interpreter — named for it in the source's own header comment, but omitted from the copyright notice immediately above that same comment. The vault has tracked this credit-misattribution since 2026-07-09 on a secondary source (Harry Lewis's 2011 blog analysis) and confirmed it directly against the primary listing on 2026-07-30. Decades later, in 2001, Davidoff — by then a working Unix/Linux engineer — publicly opposed CPRM hard-drive copy-protection, an ironic reversal given his uncredited role in the product that anchored Gates's founding anti-piracy argument.

References

• claim-davidoff-wrote-third-of-altair-basic-uncredited
• claim-davidoff-2001-opposed-cprm-drm
• claim-gates-2025-released-original-1975-altair-basic-source-scan
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-davidoff-cprm-linux.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-30-does-the-surviving-original-microsoftaltair-basic-source-listing.md