Steve Ballmer

It's sort of the Python of its day. I think the way Python is now, where you sort of joke that Python is so flexible, you know, you can like accidentally write a program by writing English and it can kind of forgive a lot of mistakes and it reads kind of like English.

It's a reasonable parallel to draw it way back when with BASIC, where you say, look, you can understand it as a layman, but also it's used in a broad set of business applications.

It's a reasonable parallel to draw it way back when with BASIC, where you say, look, you can understand it as a layman, but also it's used in a broad set of business applications.

They're handwriting assembly code.

They're handwriting assembly code.

Nolan Bushnell told us about that.

Nolan Bushnell told us about that.

And he was here at the University of Washington?

And he was here at the University of Washington?

They've identified a market opportunity, and that opportunity is reducing traffic.

They've identified a market opportunity, and that opportunity is reducing traffic.

Great. Big market. And listeners, are you kind of sensing what's happening here? Mainframe, mini computer, microprocessor. We kind of have to keep using smaller and smaller words to represent the fact that the computer is getting smaller and smaller here.

Great. Big market. And listeners, are you kind of sensing what's happening here? Mainframe, mini computer, microprocessor. We kind of have to keep using smaller and smaller words to represent the fact that the computer is getting smaller and smaller here.

And it is funny that it kind of stopped there. The computers that are sitting on all of our desks are microcomputers.

And it is funny that it kind of stopped there. The computers that are sitting on all of our desks are microcomputers.

They're doing the same thing. It's funny. In many ways, at this point in history, getting a manual was actually much more valuable than getting the processor itself, because the processor would arrive, and unless there was documentation, you would have no idea how to interact with it to take advantage of its power. But if you had a manual...

They're doing the same thing. It's funny. In many ways, at this point in history, getting a manual was actually much more valuable than getting the processor itself, because the processor would arrive, and unless there was documentation, you would have no idea how to interact with it to take advantage of its power. But if you had a manual...

Well, sure, you couldn't actually test the stuff you wrote for it on the hardware.

Well, sure, you couldn't actually test the stuff you wrote for it on the hardware.

But if you wrote an emulator on a bigger, more powerful computer that could sort of mimic the computer that you're actually targeting, you could go years before actually ever running the software on the target device and just work off of what the manual says, as long as the manual is correct and matches how it actually works.