Monte Davidoff

Monte Davidoff (/ˈmɒnti ˈdeɪvɪdɒf/; born 1956) is an American computer programmer who was one of the first employees of Microsoft.^[1]

Davidoff is from Glendale, Wisconsin.^[1] He graduated from Nicolet High School in 1974. As a high-school student, he developed a deep interest in computers and taught himself to code in different languages and for different computers.^[2] He subsequently attended Harvard College, majoring in mathematics.^[2] At that time, Harvard did not have a separate program for computer science; students interested in this subject typically majored in (applied) mathematics, physics, or engineering.^[3] Davidoff also worked at WHRB, the college radio station, and graduated from Harvard in 1978.

Davidoff was a schoolmate of Bill Gates at Harvard.^[1] Gates and his business partner, Paul Allen, met Davidoff while discussing how to write a floating-point algorithm.^[2] Impressed with his technical knowledge and experience, Gates and Allen recruited Davidoff, then a freshman, for their new company Micro-Soft. (The hyphen was dropped in 1976.)^[1][2] Davidoff was assigned the task of writing floating-point arithmetic routines for Altair BASIC over the summer, when the three of them lived Albuquerque, New Mexico, where their company was then headquartered.^[1] Gates, Allen, and Davidoff managed to write the software without ever seeing the Altair 8800 thanks to a simulator.^[4] They also spent time at Harvard's Aiken Computation Laboratory coding on the PDP-10 on Gates' account.^[3] Their unusually high usage time was spotted by an administrator, who was concerned that it would jeopardize the school's federal funding following an audit.^[3] Gates was later admonished for allowing entry to unauthorized individuals, but Davidoff was cleared of any wrongdoing.^[5] They finished this project in 1977.^[4] Davidoff was responsible for the mathematical routines.^[6] These routines were subsequently reused in Microsoft BASIC products for other systems.^[7] The source code is now available at the Pusey Library of Harvard University.^[6]

Davidoff returned to Harvard to finish his degree. He later worked at Honeywell Information Systems on the Multics project, Tandem Computers, Ready Systems, and Stratus Computer.^[4] Since 2000, he has been working as a consultant through his own company, Alluvial Software, in Cupertino, California.^[1] Although he facilitated the rise of Microsoft, he later became a Linux user. His favorite programming language is Python.^[4]

See also

• Biographies portal
• Computer programming portal

• BASIC
• Microsoft Binary Format