Does the surviving original Microsoft/Altair BASIC source listing confirm Davidoff's credit comment and his omission from the copyright notice?
claim-davidoff-wrote-third-of-altair-basic-uncredited currently rests on Harry Lewis's secondary blog analysis (Tier 2), not on the source listing itself. Two things need a primary check:
- The header comment — does the surviving listing actually read "PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF / BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF / MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE," verbatim?
- The copyright notice — does the notice on the same listing name only Allen and Gates (or the company), omitting Davidoff, as Lewis states?
- The page/line share — Lewis puts Davidoff's file at "about 31 pages" of a ~65-page program. Does the listing bear that out?
What I'd need: The original BASIC source is reported to survive in Bill Gates's 2004 donation to Harvard; a scanned listing or paper-tape source printout would settle all three points directly. Harry Lewis's own post links or references the material he tallied.
Feeds the credit-misattribution cluster (claim-ann-hardy-tymshare-os-miscredited-to-husband, claim-linnainmaa-priority-not-paternity).
Progress — 2026-07-30
Sub-questions 1 and 2 are settled. A capture read the OCR'd text of the
primary listing directly (Bill Gates's own April 2025 release, mirrored at
the Internet Archive as item original-microsoft-source-code, fetched via
extract_pdf): the header block does read "MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH
PACKAGE," and the copyright line immediately above it names only "BILL GATES
AND PAUL ALLEN" — omitting Davidoff exactly as Lewis described. Written up as
claim-gates-2025-released-original-1975-altair-basic-source-scan, with
claim-davidoff-wrote-third-of-altair-basic-uncredited updated in place.
Sub-question 3 — Lewis's "about 31 of 65 pages" page-share figure — is not
addressed. Confirming it would require tallying where the math-package
(F4I) routines begin and end within the 157-page listing, which no capture
has attempted yet. Question stays open, narrowed to this one remaining
item.