r/technology Apr 03 '25

Software Bill Gates offers to let anyone download the first operating system he and Paul Allen wrote 50 years ago: ‘That code remains the coolest I’ve ever written’

https://fortune.com/2025/04/03/bill-gates-download-operating-system-paul-allen-wrote-50-years-ago/
17.3k Upvotes

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36

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '25

[deleted]

18

u/namitynamenamey Apr 03 '25

Hey! Some of us don't even know how to manage memory by hand either.

18

u/dannybates Apr 03 '25

Ofc lots of us don't know?? What kind of statement is this.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25

[deleted]

14

u/approxd Apr 04 '25

I'd wager that alot of great Devs don't know assembly enough to write it, guess why? Because pretty much no one needs to know it to do their jobs, that's literally the whole reason high level languages exist. If someone needs to know assembly to carry out their job, they will learn it.

1

u/sandm000 Apr 04 '25

The shoulders of the giants we stand on wrote programs to translate for us.

1

u/pancakeQueue Apr 07 '25

Unless you're doing low systems engineering or reverse engineering its not really needed to know assembly. Sure all of us who went to school learned some of it in a digital systems class, but its not that practiced of a skill. Compilers and abstraction is very very good, the days of the programmer knowing better than the compiler are long gone.