From GOTO 10 to AI: A Piece of My History is Now Open Source

Well, this is a blast from the past. I just saw the news from Microsoft's Scott Hanselman and Stacey Haffner: they've officially open-sourced the original 1978 source code for Microsoft 6502 BASIC.

For most folks in tech, this is a cool piece of history. For me, it’s like finding a box of old family photos in the attic. As the former product manager who lived and breathed Visual Basic from its revolutionary 1.0 days all the way through the transition to Visual Studio, this news hits different. This code isn't just a historical artifact; it's the primordial soup from which my career, and the careers of millions of developers, emerged.

The Original 'Hello, World'

This is the code that powered legends like the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. It’s the code that taught a generation of us how to program with its iconic simplicity:

 10 PRINT "HELLO GAP"
20 GOTO 10

This tiny 8K marvel, written in 6502 assembly by Bill Gates and Ric Weiland, was licensed to Commodore for a flat fee of $25,000. Twenty-five grand! That investment put Microsoft at the heart of the home computing revolution and set the stage for everything that followed.

The bloodline is direct and undeniable. This 6502 BASIC is the direct ancestor of GW-BASIC, which evolved into QBASIC, which then became the beating heart of the project that consumed a huge chunk of my career: Visual Basic. We spent years building on that foundation of accessibility, trying to keep the spirit of "making programming easy" alive with drag-and-drop forms and an event-driven model. Seeing the original source, with its clever tricks and handwritten comments, feels like looking at the blueprints for your own house.

From 8-bit to AI

It’s funny to look back on that from my desk here at GAP, where I work on our GAPVelocity AI platform. The contrast is staggering. We’ve gone from meticulously counting every byte in an 8K ROM to architecting AI solutions that use models with billions of parameters. The scale of compute is just on a completely different planet.

But the core mission? It's still surprisingly similar.

Back then, the goal was to give someone the power to make a character flash on a screen or calculate a budget. Today, with GAPVelocity AI, the goal is to give businesses the power to understand their data, automate processes, and build smarter products. Whether it’s a GOTO loop in 1978 or an AI code migration in 2025, it all comes down to the same thing: giving people the tools to solve problems and make the machine do something useful and cool.

Hats off to Microsoft for preserving this gem. If you're a developer, do yourself a favor and go browse the source code. It’s a masterclass in efficiency and a beautiful time capsule from the dawn of our industry.