best laid plans...

As I drove around yesterday in the bright sun, I decided I would spend my vacation day tomorrow taking pictures. I pictured some snowy scenes I wanted to capture in the sun. I figured if it wasn't sunny on wednesday, I could try again this weekend.

Today, the forecast for tomorrow calls for partly cloudy. That will likely mean all cloudy. So what about saturday or sunday? Saturday says high of 35, and a 50% chance of precipitation. That would be rain. Thereby trashing the snow for the rest of the week, at least.

Ugh.

I thought about switching my afternoon off from tomorrow to today, but I had three meetings scheduled. Turns out that two of them were cancelled, and the other wasn't all that important. My only silver lining is that I can still get most of my pictures if it's cloudy.

Just today, I realized I could probably get somebody to fix my ski boot (well enough to use a few times, anyway). But now it sounds like the snow might not stick around. And I'd been starting to make plans for a snow sculpture for Christmas. No chance of that if it rains.

As soon as I start making plans for the snow, it changes - usually around the time I get a chance to enjoy it. And people seem to think I'm joking when I say that I don't want to buy a snowblower because it will stop snowing. I neither want it to stop snowing, nor to spend all that money on something I don't need.

Altair BASIC and Microsoft

Here's a little story I found about the beginnings of Microsoft.

Bill Gates recalls that when he and Paul Allen read about the Altair in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, they understood that the price of computers would soon drop to the point that selling software for them would be a profitable business. Gates believed that by providing a BASIC interpreter for the new computer they could make it more attractive to hobbyists. They contacted MITS founder Ed Roberts, told him that they were developing an interpreter, and asked whether he would like to see a demonstration. This followed the common engineering industry practice of a trial balloon, an announcement of a non-existent product to gauge interest. Roberts agreed to meet them for a demonstration in a few weeks.

Gates and Allen had neither an interpreter nor even an Altair system on which to develop and test one. However, Allen had written an Intel 8008 emulator for their previous venture, Traf-O-Data, that ran on a PDP-10 time-sharing computer. He adapted this emulator based on the Altair programmer guide, and they developed and tested the interpreter on Harvard's PDP-10. Harvard officials were not pleased when they found out, but there was no written policy that covered the use of this computer. Gates and Allen bought computer time from a timesharing service in Boston to complete their BASIC. They hired Harvard student Monte Davidoff to write floating-point arithmetic routines for the interpreter, a feature not available in many of its competitors. The finished interpreter, including its own I/O system and line editor, fit in only four kilobytes of memory, leaving plenty of room for the interpreted program. In preparation for the demo, they stored the finished interpreter on a punched tape that the Altair could read and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque. On final approach, Allen realized that they had forgotten to write a bootstrap program to read the tape into memory. Writing in 8080 machine language, Allen finished the program before the plane landed. Only when they loaded the program onto an Altair and saw a prompt asking for the system's memory size did Gates and Allen know that their interpreter worked on the Altair hardware.