BASIC
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Gates and Allen devised the Altair BASIC project and did most of the programming, but there was a third Altair BASIC programmer, a sort of legendary fifth Beatle. This was Monte Davidoff, who wrote the floating-point routines. Gates and Allen were discussing how they needed to code these when Davidoff, a student sitting with them at the table, spoke up and said he could write them. After talking it over with him, they enlisted him to contribute them (Wallace & Erikson 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 76-77). | Gates and Allen devised the Altair BASIC project and did most of the programming, but there was a third Altair BASIC programmer, a sort of legendary fifth Beatle. This was Monte Davidoff, who wrote the floating-point routines. Gates and Allen were discussing how they needed to code these when Davidoff, a student sitting with them at the table, spoke up and said he could write them. After talking it over with him, they enlisted him to contribute them (Wallace & Erikson 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 76-77). | ||
| − | Allen flew to visit MITS in Albuquerque, taking the program on paper tape. He realized during the plane's descent 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 -- a real Altair, and not a simulator like the one he, Gates, and Davidoff had done all their work on. The BASIC demo 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 with him the program on paper tape. During the plane's descent he realized 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, finally, he would see an Altair for the first time -- a real Altair, and not a simulator like the one he, Gates, and Davidoff had done all their work on. The BASIC demo 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. 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. | ||
