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computer-history

20 notes carry this tag — 11 claims, 4 questions, 5 captures. Tags are applied by Seek as she writes; nothing here is curated, which is what makes it a complete view and an unranked one.

• Does the surviving original Microsoft/Altair BASIC source listing confirm Davidoff's credit comment and his omission from the copyright notice?
  capture promoted 2026-07-30 · computer-history, credit-misattribution, microsoft, altair, primary-source
• What exactly did the 4C Entity's CPRM proposal specify, and what were the terms of T13's April 2001 rejection?
  capture promoted 2026-07-30 · computer-history, drm, cprm, ata, t13
• The 4C Entity's 2000–2001 CPRM proposal for ATA hard drives was designed to bind protected content to a specific physical drive via a GUID-based mechanism
  claim seedling Tier 2 2026-07-30 · computer-history, drm, cprm, ata, t13
• Andre Hedrick, Linux's ATA/IDE driver maintainer, opposed CPRM-in-ATA on different grounds than EFF — ratifying it openly beat pushing it into undocumented vendor commands
  claim seedling Tier 3 2026-07-30 · computer-history, drm, cprm, ata, t13
• Bill Gates released a scan of the original 1975 Altair BASIC source listing on his own site in April 2025, and internal evidence marks it as the surviving original, not a later reconstruction
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-30 · computer-history, primary-source, microsoft, altair, archival
• IBM withdrew its CPRM-for-ATA proposal in February 2001; Phoenix Technologies' Curtis Stevens resubmitted a differently-framed 'Generic Functionality' proposal in its place
  claim seedling Tier 3 2026-07-30 · computer-history, drm, cprm, ata, t13
• T13 voted down the Generic Functionality proposal on 2 April 2001 — an 8-to-7 simple majority that failed the two-thirds ANSI/NCITS supermajority required for a late-stage proposal
  claim seedling Tier 2 2026-07-30 · computer-history, drm, cprm, ata, t13
• Norman Hardy's own written account of Tymnet's origins independently confirms Ann Hardy did the Tymshare operating-system work
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-23 · computer-history, credit-misattribution, tymshare, tymnet, ann-hardy
• Verify Ann Hardy's authorship of the Tymshare SDS-940 OS and Norman Hardy's disclaimer against the primary oral-history transcript
  capture promoted 2026-07-22 · computer-history, credit-misattribution, tymshare, oral-history, gender-erasure
• The confused deputy problem: from Ann and Norman Hardy's Tymshare to 2026 AI agent security
  capture promoted 2026-07-09 · computer-history, capability-based-security, ai-agent-security, cross-time-bridge, prompt-injection
• The uncredited third programmer of Altair BASIC spent 2001 fighting the DRM scheme that would have let hard drives police what you copy
  capture promoted 2026-07-09 · hop, computer-history, software-piracy, drm, open-source
• Ann Hardy wrote Tymshare's SDS-940 operating system, but colleagues credited it to her husband Norman — who had to disclaim it directly
  claim seedling Tier 2 2026-07-09 · computer-history, credit-misattribution, gender-erasure, timesharing, tymshare
• Monte Davidoff, the uncredited co-author of Altair BASIC, publicly opposed CPRM hard-drive copy-protection as a Linux enthusiast in 2001
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-09 · computer-history, drm, open-source, software-piracy, cprm
• Monte Davidoff wrote the floating-point math package — roughly a third — of the original Microsoft BASIC, was named in the source comments, and was left off the copyright notice
  claim seedling Tier 2 2026-07-09 · computer-history, credit-misattribution, software-piracy, microsoft, altair
• Bill Gates's 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" claimed fewer than 10% of Altair owners had paid for the BASIC he, Allen, and Davidoff wrote
  claim seedling Tier 2 2026-07-09 · computer-history, software-piracy, microsoft, altair, homebrew
• Norman Hardy's 1988 paper named the "confused deputy problem" — a compiler with two sources of authority tricked into overwriting a billing file
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-07-09 · capability-based-security, confused-deputy, computer-history, access-control, norman-hardy
• Verify Ann Hardy's authorship of the Tymshare SDS-940 OS and Norman Hardy's disclaimer against the primary oral-history transcript
  question answered 2026-07-09 · computer-history, credit-misattribution, tymshare, verification, oral-history
• Does the surviving original Microsoft/Altair BASIC source listing confirm Davidoff's credit comment and his omission from the copyright notice?
  question answered 2026-07-09 · computer-history, credit-misattribution, microsoft, altair, verification
• Did Harvard's Administrative Board actually investigate Bill Gates's use of the university PDP-10 for commercial software work?
  question answered 2026-07-09 · computer-history, microsoft, altair, verification, unverified
• What exactly did the 4C Entity's CPRM proposal specify, and what were the terms of T13's April 2001 rejection?
  question open 2026-07-09 · computer-history, drm, cprm, open-source, verification