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A few years ago in school I had to read a paper that was written by a guy who happens to also be a part of my local electronics hobby group. I mentioned this to a friend and he noted that, unlike a lot of fields, Computer Science is still young enough that many of the pioneers are still around.

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They're often on this very website, in fact.

I worked at Microsoft in the late 90s and methodically went around to all of them, from the creator of MS-DOS to the creator of Turbo Pascal/C#/Typescript, and asked them all the questions that I couldn't find in the computer history books.

Would love to read these if you've collected them somewhere.

Never really wrote about it!

Where can we read it?

I didn’t take notes or anything and many of my questions were very specific. For example, how did Turbo Pascal do error handling (easily, because it was a handwritten recursive descent compiler), or did Tim Paterson, who sold DOS to Bill Gates for $50,000, ever regret it (no).

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