It’s intriguing how different people’s destinies unfold. Gates’ blog has published the source code for the original Altair Basic. Besides the well-known Gates (worth >$100 billion) and Allen (he passed away, but was around $20 billion), there appears the name Monte Davidoff, about whom very little is known.
Monte wrote all the “mathematics” with floating point for Microsoft Basic. It only lasted until version 4.0, after which, about a decade later, the IEEE 754 standard came along, and things changed slightly.
Since 2000, he has owned his consulting company, and its website (built in PHP) seems not to have changed since 2000 (though he did update the year to 2025 in the footer).
There are no photos of him online, almost no information about what he does, but there are two interviews, one in text, and another on Floppy days as a podcast. Apparently, he just quietly “tends to his own stove”.
Among the employees of the first Microsoft team—remember, the iconic photo?—there is Bob O’Rear, who held the position of chief mathematician. He played a key role in developing MS-DOS for the IBM PC. O’Rear left the company in 1993 and returned to Texas, where he took up cattle ranching on his own farm.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 