Bill Gates’ Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC

Pagetable.com has an interesting article on a Microsoft easter egg. “If you type ‘WAIT6502,1’ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string ‘MICROSOFT!’ at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg ‘after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel’, ‘just in case Commodore ever tried to claim that the code wasn’t from Microsoft’. In this episode of Computer Archeology, we will not only examine this story, but also track down the history of Microsoft BASIC on various computers, and see see how Microsoft added a second easter egg to the TSR-80 Color Computer – because they had forgotten about the first one.”

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  1. 2008-10-07 12:17 pm
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