GW-Basic

[John Foust]

At 09:07 PM 4/12/2005, you wrote:
>On Tue, 12 Apr 2005, Classic Computers wrote:
>> GW stands for Gordon Whitten, a Microsoft employee.
>> If you Google gw-basic, you'll find a couple of places
>> that say Greg Whitten, but it's Gordon.
>
>There have apparently been both a Gordon Whitten AND a Greg Whitten at
>Microsoft at various times.  Neither is in the 1978 photo that shows the
>original 11 people of Micro-Soft.
>
>If you do, indeed, Google "gw-basic" or "gw-basic whitten", then you will
>find dozens of places that say "GREG Whitten" as the namesake of GW-BASIC,
>and Google does not index ANY sites that say that "Gordon Whitten" was the
>namesake.  Is there a more reliable source for your assertion than Google?

At least one of the Wiki articles point to Joel Spolsky's page at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/TwoStories.html ,
where he describes a meeting during his employment at Microsoft:

  "This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App 
  Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee 
  number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to 
  anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a 
  lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."

http://www.pcmag.co.uk/analysis/74182 tells another anecdote from 
the book "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" where Greg Whitten is the
head of a graphics group in the autumn of '83.  A new hire uncovers 
a bug in BASIC's flood-fill, shows his fix to Whitten and Gates
and he's told the error was in Gates' code.

However, other Chapter One excerpts of the same book such as
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/barbariansledbybillgates.htm
say his name is Gordon Whitten.  Or maybe "Gordo" was a nickname
and someone assumed it meant Gordon although his real name was Greg.

I'm not well-acquainted with this particular book, but I read somewhere 
it was co-written by Pam Edstrom's daughter and a Microsoft employee, 
so perhaps they didn't do top-quality fact-checking.

The "GW" matches "Gates, William" too.  Dr. Greg Whitten looks reachable
at http://www.numerix.com/company/execMgmt.htm, too.  I'll ask him to 
reconcile the stories.

- John