What are the names of the engineers at Microsoft who created Commodore Basic V2?

Microsoft produced many variants of BASIC in the late 70s and early
80s, and I am looking for those that worked on the variant known as
Commodore BASIC V2 for the PET and CBM64.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 09 Jan 2005 18:58 PST

davepl-ga,

There are some fairly detailed histories available for the Commodore
computers, and from what I can make out, Microsoft provided only one
version of the Basic operating system to Commodore for use, initially,
in the PET, and that version was written by none other than Bill Gates
and Paul Allen.

Does that sound right to you, or do you have reason to suppose that
others were involved?

Let me know.

pafalafa-ga

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Clarification of Question by davepl-ga on 09 Jan 2005 19:46 PST

No, its not the same BASIC as Gates and Allen wrote, as that was
written for the Altair, whereas CBM basic is 6502 assembly.

Not sure about why someone posted a general Commodore history, that's
pretty far off topic...

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 09 Jan 2005 20:04 PST

Dave,

FYI, anyone can comment in the Comments section below, but only Google
Answers researcher like myself can post here in the Clarifications
section. Researchers are also identified by the fact that their
GA-name is hyperlinked and appears in a blue type.

As for the history, I've seen numerous references to the fact that
Commodore was the only company in history to receive a one-time fee
(no royalties) license from Microsoft for the Basic to run the
Commodore PET.  While it may be the case that Altair also had a
Gates/Allen operating system, it seems that the Commodore PET did as
well.

What leads you to believe this was not the case?

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Clarification of Question by davepl-ga on 09 Jan 2005 22:15 PST

The BASIC for the 6502 would have had to have been almost a complete
rewrite rather than derivative of the Altair code, since they
instruction sets are so different.  By the time work began on the 6502
BASICs, I don't think Gates or Allen were still active in product
development.

The full-screen editor and other unique aspects of the CBM basic make
it appear to be quite a separate code branch from the original Altair
BASIC as well.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 10 Jan 2005 05:14 PST

This is the information I found:

"The COMMODORE BASIC Operating System was written by Bill Gates and
Paul Allen from their fledgling Micro-Soft Corporation (later renamed
to Microsoft Corporation).  Commodore Basic was the only software
license ever granted by Microsoft to any company for all products
regardless of the number of copies used.  Commodore went on to produce
literally millions of machines with various forms of Commodore Basic
and did not pay Microsoft a single cent after the initial licence
purchase in 1976/7..."

What do you think...?

paf

Well I have found a welth of information about the commodor. Ummm
Internet explore is crashing so I am going to lose my place on what I
was looking for in the other 4 browsers I have open. So this is the
best I can do right now. Commodore International, a manufacturer of
electronic products, was a leading player in the early years of the
personal-computer revolution. A pioneering innovator, the company
produced a series of low-cost, easy-to-use machines that introduced
millions of people to computers. At its height, Commodore was a
billion-dollar company, outrunning its competitors in technical acumen
and dwarfing them in sales. In the early 1980s it appeared that the
maverick organization would dominate the global computer market. A
combination of mismanagement and poor marketing caused Commodore's
position to steadily erode for nearly a decade. In 1994 the
Bahamas-based company liquidated its assets and went out of business.
Yet in its wake Commodore left legions of loyal users, and posed
technological challenges that its former rivals are still unraveling.

http://www.mergetel.com/~blitz/C64/c64info.html

Bil Herd - Special Guest Speaker
President /CEO InterActive Network Systems, Inc.
Bil Herd was a senior designer engineer at Commodore during the early
'80's. He designed the hardware for the Commodore C128 and "TED/Plus4"
series of computers (116, 264, 364) and also laid down the
architecture for the Commodore LCD, one of the earliest forms of the
modern Laptop.

"This was a unique time in computer history, when a handful of
(mostly) young individuals could craft a computer with the resources
of one of the largest computer manufacturers at the time at our
disposal and yet there were no 'design committees' or 'management
oversight groups' to get in the way of true progress."

http://www.luckyclub.net/prev-expos.html

Commodore BASIC might have been 6502 
- but so was AppleSoft BASIC ( not the short lived Apple Integer BASIC )
- and guess who wrote AppleSoft BASIC ???

This also explains the remarkable similarity between the
implementation of Computhink disk drives on the Pet and the use of
floppies on the Apple.

My understanding is that Gates & Co got their first leg up debugging
the BASIC on something like the DEC PDP8 - after that they simply
shunted it around.
Not that dim, as I vaguely remember something to do with cross compilers.

Added info is that in the early 1980's I was talking to a techy in his
lair in Epson UK and shown a 5" thick listing of an 8088/6 variant of
MSBASIC which started off with things like : 'Bill Gates wrote this'

PDP -> 6502 -> 8080 -> 8088

Gates and Allen wrote the BASIC for the Mits Altair
(http://www.vintage-computer.com/altair8800.shtml) and then formed
Micro-Soft (later Microsoft) which wrote versions for a bunch of other
computers, including the Commodore Pet
(http://www.vintage-computer.com/pet2001.shtml) with a very small
staff.

I would be surprised if the BASIC written for the Commodore in
1976/1977 was engineered by anyone other than Gates and Allen
considering how soon after the formation of Microsoft it happened.

Later BASIC implementations such as those for the IBM PC may have had
other contributors.

  VC