Anders Hejlsberg

Well, I was lucky enough to attend a high school that, this is back in Copenhagen, that offered students access to a computer.

It was one of the first high schools in Denmark to do so.

And we're talking, you know, mid to late 70s now.

And I sort of got bitten by it then, you know, just this idea that you could program this machine and make it do things.

You know, the wonder of figuring out how it was put together.

Of course, it was like completely ancient by modern standards.

It was like this HP 2100 with 32K of ferrite core memory.

You could literally open it up and

see the ferrite cores.

I mean, it was, it was amazing.

You know, paper tape reader and, uh, you know, and then we got a one megabyte, 14 inch hard drive, and that was just state of the art.

The bootloader was on paper tape because there was no ROM in the machine.

So, so it started up, it knew nothing.

And so you had to type in the instruction sequence to load the bootloader that would then load the OS, um, off of the hard drive.

Well, this was a Hewlett Packard.

So it had Fortran, which I found to be very quirky.

It had a very slow, basic interpreter, but then it had alcohol.

Hewlett Packard's version of ALKOL, which was an interesting compiler implementation because it didn't support recursion, which is kind of bizarre.

You know, the call instruction of that machine would store the return address in the first word of the subroutine and then just execute.

And then to return, you would jump to that indirect through that word.