Monte Davidoff is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 computer programmer. He graduated from Nicolet High School

Nicolet High School

Nicolet High School is a public secondary school located in Glendale, Wisconsin. It is the only school in the Nicolet Unified School District, which serves Glendale, Fox Point, Bayside, and River Hills. Primary schooling is administered by three feeder districts. The Nicolet Unified School district...

 in Glendale, Wisconsin

Glendale, Wisconsin

Glendale is a city in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 13,367 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Glendale is located at ....

 in 1974. He went on to Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, where he majored in applied mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, the department at Harvard that, at the time, included computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

. He also worked at WHRB

WHRB

WHRB is a commercial FM radio station in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It broadcasts at 95.3 MHz and is operated by students at Harvard College.-History:...

, the college radio station. He graduated from Harvard in 1978.

Davidoff is best-known for writing the floating-point arithmetic routines for Altair BASIC

Altair BASIC

Altair BASIC was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product , distributed by MITS under a contract...

 while he was at Harvard. The routines were subsequently reused in Microsoft BASIC

Microsoft BASIC

Microsoft BASIC was the foundation product of the Microsoft company. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first BASIC, and the first high level programming language available for the MITS Altair 8800 hobbyist microcomputer....

 products for other systems. He later worked at Honeywell Information Systems

Honeywell

Honeywell International, Inc. is a major conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments....

 on the Multics

Multics

Multics was an influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

 project, Tandem Computers

Tandem Computers

Tandem Computers, Inc. was the dominant manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems for ATM networks, banks, stock exchanges, telephone switching centers, and other similar commercial transaction processing applications requiring maximum uptime and zero data loss. The company was founded in...

, Ready Systems, and Stratus Computer. Since 2000 he has consulted

Consultant

A consultant is a professional who provides professional or expert advice in a particular area such as management, accountancy, the environment, entertainment, technology, law , human resources, marketing, emergency management, food production, medicine, finance, life management, economics, public...

 through his own company, Alluvial Software.

External links

• Alluvial Software
• 2001 Interview of Davidoff in The Register
  The Register
  The Register is a British technology news and opinion website. It was founded by John Lettice, Mike Magee and Ross Alderson in 1994 as a newsletter called "Chip Connection", initially as an email service...