BASIC
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The code of this first Microsoft project is mainly by Gates and Allen, though, with Gates listed as first author. Comments at the beginning of the code declare, "BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF," which he did over a period of eight weeks at Harvard. Gates would say years later that this 4 KB BASIC interpreter "was the coolest program I ever wrote" (Wallace & Erikson p. 76-77). | The code of this first Microsoft project is mainly by Gates and Allen, though, with Gates listed as first author. Comments at the beginning of the code declare, "BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF," which he did over a period of eight weeks at Harvard. Gates would say years later that this 4 KB BASIC interpreter "was the coolest program I ever wrote" (Wallace & Erikson p. 76-77). | ||
| − | Allen flew to visit MITS in Albuquerque, taking the program on paper tape. He realized during the plane's decent that he did not have a bootloader that would allow the Altair to read the tape, so he wrote one in machine language as the plane was landing. Then, he headed to see an Altair for the first time -- all of the work he, Gates, and Davidoff had done was via a simulator. The BASIC demo, of course, was a success and the interpreter was licensed by MITS. Gates and Allen moved to New Mexico to create new versions of BASIC for the Altair and to maintain the original code, and Microsoft was booted and running. | + | Allen flew to visit MITS in Albuquerque, taking the program on paper tape. He realized during the plane's decent that he did not have a way to get the Altair to read the tape and run it -- a bootloader. So he wrote one in machine language as the plane was landing. Then, he headed to see an Altair for the first time -- all of the work he, Gates, and Davidoff had done was via a simulator. The BASIC demo, of course, was a success and the interpreter was licensed by MITS. Gates and Allen moved to New Mexico to create new versions of BASIC for the Altair and to maintain the original code, and Microsoft was booted and running. |
From a technical and business standpoint, Altair BASIC was not an early oddity, but a Microsoft product with a strong relationship to the company's later flagship products. To see the connection, it's important to understand the nature of computing platforms and their relationship to markets of different sorts. | From a technical and business standpoint, Altair BASIC was not an early oddity, but a Microsoft product with a strong relationship to the company's later flagship products. To see the connection, it's important to understand the nature of computing platforms and their relationship to markets of different sorts. | ||
