Twenty six years ago the microprocessor revolution found a software catalyst - a tiny BASIC interpreter that ran in 4K of memory. You've probably heard of two of its three authors - Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who'd incorporated the company 'Micro-Soft' in Albuquerque the same year. But what not many people know is that there was a third guy, Monte Davidoff, who wrote the floating point algorithms for the interpreter, which by the way was one of its strong points.

Paul and Bill went on to be the biggest billionaires in the IT field and Davidoff just faded into obscurity. Last that was heard, he had founded a consulting company called Alluvial, anybody heard of it? I didn't think so. But It just got me wondering, did he have a fallout with the rest, or wasn't he smart enough to keep up ? Or could it have been that he didn't see the future that they saw, Talk about fate's cruelty! Or shall I say one man's "dulling"