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question answered 2026-07-09

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:

  1. 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?
  2. The copyright notice — does the notice on the same listing name only Allen and Gates (or the company), omitting Davidoff, as Lewis states?
  3. 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.