Yesterday I was searching the Web for tidbits I might add to my notes about qbasic. I didn't really find anything I could use. But I did find a surprising number of people (mostly fledgling teenage programmers, judging by the sites) who believe Microsoft chairman Bill Gates invented the programming language called BASIC, or that the history of BASIC begins in 1975 with the BASIC interpreter he helped write for the Altair.

Then, on this morning's "Today," Katie Curic interviewed John Heilemann, author of a new book about the federal antitrust suit against Microsoft. The book is a longer version of an already long article that appeared in the November 2000 issue of Wired. The portrait Heilemann paints of Gates, while on the whole unflattering, seems pretty fair-minded, especially compared with both the hagiography and the vitriol that his subject has inspired.

For the youngsters: John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz invented BASIC in 1964. They were also pioneers in what was then called "time-sharing," which made university mainframes available for use by millions of college students.

Dartmouth's website has a 1991 QuickTime interview with Dr. Kemeny. During World War II, Kemeny was drafted into the Army and served as a mathematician with John von Neumann in Los Alamos. After the war, he was a research assistant to Albert Einstein at Princeton. He eventually became president of Dartmouth.

But if you like gnashing your teeth about Microsoft's hegemony, read the short piece Gates wrote for Time a few weeks after the antitrust verdict. I couldn't believe it when I read it back in May, and I don't consider myself a Microsoft basher.

To a programmer, an operating system is supposed to be a platform on which anyone can build programs. The "symbiosis" Gates mentions is ideally accomplished through open, thoroughly documented, robustly designed APIs (application programming interfaces). What Gates appears to be defending is Microsoft's right to keep parts of these interfaces secret, so that only Microsoft programs can use them.

Even so, this wouldn't be such a problem, were Microsoft's operating system not also a monopoly.