Jest to o tyle ciekawe, że jakby w tym momencie zamknęło się pewne koło. ;-) Wszak wcześniej Bill G. pracował przez rok dla Atari, a jego zadaniem było... znalezienie bugów w BASIC-u i przekazanie raportu firmie. Efekt ponoć był taki, że Bill G. dostał kod źródłowy od Atari do analizy, przez rok nic nie zrobił i.. nawet jakąś kasę wziął, a kilka miesięcy potem, ukazał się... MS BASIC. :)

"There is a period at Atari when there were no games coming from Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, and myself. As the most senior designers at Atari, we were tasked with creating the 800 operating system. This group, plus two others, wrote the entire operating system in about 8 months. A funny story from this time that Al Miller likes to tell has to do with the Atari BASIC cartridge that was to ship with the system. Atari had contracted with a young programmer named Bill Gates to modify a BASIC compiler that he had for another system to be used on the 800. After that project stalled for over a year Al was called upon to replace him with another developer. So, while Al is the only person I know ever to have fired Bill Gates, I suspect that rather than work on Atari BASIC, Gates was spending all his time on DOS for IBM. Probably not a bad career choice for him, do you think?" xxxviii

- David Crane

In a million dollar deal, Atari contracted a company called Microsoft to port the BASIC programming language to the Atari 800. A young developer named Bill Gates was responsible for the project. One year later, the software had yet to be completed, and Alan Miller, an Atari game designer and programmer, took over the project. This very likely makes him the only person to have fired Bill Gates.

Wygląda jakbyś miał niewłaściwą strefę czasową. Dla weryfikacji - ja pisze o 10:14 czasu poludniowowarszawskiego.