BASIC Predates Microsoft by Over a Decade, Microsoft-Controlled Sites Like The Register MS Don't Want You to Know This
Openwashing and revisionism by The Register MS while covering up for a prominent child sex trafficking facilitator. Follow the money.
It is widely known that Bill Epsteingate got many of his "ideas" from a literal trash, right?
The common man and woman very well understands that, no?
Maybe not.
The media quit talking about how the young Bill Epsteingate, who had been arrested at least twice, went through discarded code of other people in the literal dumpster.
So let's remind people of that.
In his very own words: "So, for a few years that is where I spent my time. I'd skip out on athletics and go down to this computer center. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those."
Yes, from the trash. Notice BASIC in there.
Is BASIC back in the news this week?
Yes.
Why?
Openwashing and revisionism.
They want us to think again of Microsoft@50 and of Bill Epsteingate as a quiet, humble genius, not a gangster, cheater, and generally corrupt pervert, who liked to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein (the cause of his wife divorcing him, according to her).
So if we debunk a lot of the media on this, we should at least point out what this media is trying to distract from and who sponsors this media.
First of all, the code they speak of is of no value to anybody in 2025. Set aside the licensing...
When speaking about the code spilled to proprietary GitHub we should state upfront that it is hard to be sure if that's the 'trashed code'; we don't know which bits of code (exactly what lines of code) Bill Epsteingate got from the dumpster and who the real authors were. In fact, it's so old that people in 2025 cannot determine this anymore. The original authors likely died decades ago and I was not even born yet, so what/how would I know? I spoke to folks older than me. "I presume that is the same source code for the Dartmouth BASIC which Gates gained through dumpster diving?" I was told, alluding to this piece about "coded by Bill Gates" (says The Register MS), echoing his recent PR campaign and revisionism meant to distract from scandals that can put him in prison again.
From the SI article (interview; more information in paulallen.com), or from Bill Epsteingate directly: "The BASIC they did which we got ahold of the BASIC source code and enhanced t quite a bit was great. They had AID and FORTRAN. They didn't have a very good COBOL until a little bit later on. But it was a very solid time-sharing system. Lots of great experimentation going on with it."
So is all (or some of) that code which the media talks about this week actually Microsoft's? Or was it from the trash? Does it predate Microsoft? Consider some background information for BASIC. It's over 61 by now. Microsoft is just over 50.
It's hard to know for sure where the code really came from (originally, as in the "true DNA" of this code). In fact, it can only be pointed out (in light of the two facts above) that there's a story they try to distract from, in effect rewriting history. We want to remind people that BASIC is a lot older then Microsoft (many wrongly assume that it came from Microsoft) and let readers draw their own conclusions, both about Microsoft and about the state of the media. The charlatans that pay the media were "digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those..."
"The Dartmouth BASIC is not named in either [of the articles above]," I was told, "but the dumpster diving is in both."
It's an important historical fact, unless Bill Epsteingate chose to boast about taking other people's code from the trash despite it never happening (why would someone make up such a story?).
"Original BASIC was before my time," one associate told me, "but its epicenter was during high school for me and the damage and fallout from BASIC lasted until the 2000s."
I started with PASCAL myself, so I mostly skipped the BASIC hype (or "visual" BASIC, VBScript etc.), set aside few experiments I did with BASIC as a student.
That The Register MS turns the story into another Bill Epsteingate hagiography is not surprising considering who controls the publication these days.
The Register MS is also being paid to promote and relay the "hey hi" (AI) hype and it's not alone. technologyreview.com (MTR) is also bribed to relay "HEY HI"/"hey hi" (AI) Ponzi scheme, as it has just admitted again ("In partnership with CISCO"). Ever wondered why about 80% of all MTR pieces are "hey hi" (AI) something? It's paid-for propaganda, that's what it is. Meanwhile, as noted in the sister site, the "Linux Foundation [is] Promoting Scams and Hype in Linux Foundation-Funded Sites (Sponsored to Promote Lies)" (follow the "hey hi" money).
The state of the media is really bad when it relies a lot on oligarchs' money and is appointing editors who are working for oligarchs. █