How Peter Norton or Bill Gates wrote programming codes without internet
First off, Gates started writing software in the 1970s, not the 1960s. That’s probably about the same time Norton started writing software.
Bill Gates was and is very bright. He showed an early aptitude for computers and had been working with them from his early teens.
Though Gates and Norton probably could’ve used the assistance of coding forums, most problems they figured out themselves or got help from others. For example, at one point, before Microsoft, Gates asked for help from his friend Paul Allen with a particularly difficult software development task. Asking people for help wasn’t unheard of; instead of doing it online, they did it in person.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates; early days and more recently (image credit)
Next, computers were much simpler back then. Today CPUs might have several cores running dozens of threads and can support multiple programming languages. Back in the early days, there were far fewer things going on and fewer details to worry about. In some ways, this made things harder (assembly and machine language… ouch!), but in other ways it made the technology easier to grapple. I’m not saying it was easy — it wasn’t — but it was a different landscape then.
Back then, they had paper documentation. It wasn’t as voluminous as it is today, but it was sufficient (actually, it’s what Yours Truly relied on back in his early career). Many questions could be answered or figured out by relying on that ancient form of communication.
Next, Gates didn’t write all the software himself. Microsoft’s biggest early triumph, DOS, wasn’t written by Gates or even Paul Allen. It was written by another engineer, Timothy Paterson, a developer for Seattle Computer Products. While Microsoft expanded it over the years, the early OS was the spawn of Paterson’s brain.
It doesn’t mean Paterson was a genius either. He was a talented engineer, but he relied on the same materials as Gates and Allen: paper documentation and other people. He also based his design of DOS on an existing operating system, CP/M. Incidentally, Paterson would go on to work for Microsoft at a later date. It’s possible he implemented some of the enhancements to DOS himself.
Peter Norton describes himself as “a nerd who got lucky”. He just really enjoyed investigating and figuring out how the technology that powered his computer worked. He had professional experience with writing low-level utilities for mainframes and minicomputers, which probably gave him a leg-up on developing his utilities and tools for the PC.
So, were they geniuses? Well, both were really smart. But they used the resources that were available to them at the time to do what they did. I’m sure they would’ve appreciated Internet coding forums had they been available, but they were busy building the technology that made Internet coding forums possible.
