Maybe you didn’t realize this, but Microsoft is actually older than Apple. While Apple marked its 49th anniversary earlier this week on April 1, Microsoft celebrates its 50th anniversary on April 4. To commemorate the event, Microsoft co -founder Bill Gates has sent the source code to Microsoft’s first product ever, Altair Basic.
The story of the product begins with the computer that is credited by starting the personal computer revolution, Mits Altair 8800. (Yes yes, I know what you are thinking, “What about Apple II? I thought this was Macworld!” Even PCWorld said it is the biggest PC of all time!) But the Altair 8800 has a unique place in the story. When it was shown on the front of the January 1975 edition of Popular electronicsEnthusiasts everywhere were excited about its potential, including Bill Gates and Paul Allen, then students at Harvard.
Popular electronics
Gates and Allen believed that the Altair 8800 was a sign that the “PC Revolution was imminent,” as Gates puts it. They decided to create a version of Basic that can run on Altair – Basic, for you, young whippersnappers who are too much aware of these Darn Toktoks or whatever you call them, a computer language designed for people with, with Gate’s words, “No computer experience.” Basically on an Altair 8800 would expand the device market and bring personal computing one step closer to the masses.
Gates describe some of the things they had to do to make Altair basic a real product, including not having actual access to the Intel 8080 chip that was in the Altair 8800 how to deal with memory limits (you thought 8 GB was unclear, squat, try 256 bytes!), and hurries to make a tight deadline. Eventually they signed a license agreement with MITs, and micro-soft (the name originally had a hyphen) was born.
As the story goes, Steve Wozniak Altair 8800 runs Gates’ basic at a meeting of the Homebrew Electronics Club. However, the Intel chip was too expensive, so he wrote a new version of Gates’ Altair Basic for the cheaper Motorola 6800 chip that became Apple in using a guy named Steve Jobs. A few years later they released the largest PC of the time, Apple IIAnd yes, you probably know the rest. If you don’t, here’s a contemplation.
But back to Microsoft. The Altair Basic Killing Code is available as a PDF -Download covering 157 pages. Gates is “super proud of how it turned out,” and given what Altair Basic led to, he should be. If you are a developer or a computer nerd it is worth looking for. If you are interested in learning more about Bill Gates before Microsoft, read his autobiography, Source code: My beginning.
Microsoft/Bill Gates