That's awesome. I remember flipping switching on the front of a BYTE-8 computer to input the boot loader for the paper-tape reader. 8-year-old me would have killed for fewer bytes. I don't recall anything as small as 20 bytes though... it was definitely 40 or 50 bytes.
Hey, I remember those days. Wasn't there a 2K basic before that - and an "unlabeled" one before that? I remember an article at the time - with "Palo Alto Tiny Basic" actually listed in source format. It was generally agreed that Bill Gates simply copied that Basic from the magazine and started selling it on paper tape. Somebody at the time even did a comparison, and found that the tape was almost identical to the code in the magazine article. Should we be surprised? Another billionaire getting rich on the work of others.
No, tiny basic was quite different from ms basic. The first Tiny Basic article, with the virtual machine design but not machine code, did precede MS Basic, iirc, though I don't remember any more of the history.
