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Ed Roberts realized that his Altair 8800 computer
needed software - a computer language - to make it really useful. Only hackers
would tolerate programming in zeros and ones. An easier language was needed.
The problem was - there was no Basic language available anywhere for the newly
invented Intel
8080. But one day Ed Roberts got a letter
from a company which said they had already created a version of Basic. He
immediately called the company but reached a private home in Seattle - where
nobody knew anything about the letter.
Paul Allen and
Bill Gates had written and sent the letter using letterhead they had
created for their high school computer company - Traf-o-Data. Bill was
attending Harvard, and Paul was working
in the Boston area for Honeywell. They had sent the letter - planning to do a
phone followup. They soon called Ed Roberts in
Albuquerque to see if he'd be interested in their Basic, (which didn't
actually exist yet), and he said that he would be as soon as he could get some
memory cards for the Altair so it would have enough memory to try to run Basic;
maybe in a month or so.
Herein begins some of the most misunderstood facts of the microcomputer
revolution, so pay close attention. Also remember that way back in the 2nd show
of this series I told you that DEC minicomputers played an important role, and
now we'll learn how.
Gates and Allen figured they had a 30 day window (if you'll pardon the pun) to
get a version of Basic ready to run on the Altair microcomputer. But they
didn't have didn't have a microcomputer to develop this with, because the only
microcomputer in the world at that time was sitting in
Albuquerque,
New Mexico. Seems like a Catch 22 situation - but wait.
They hadn't had an
8008 processor either, which they used in their high school computer
company Traf-o-Data - which measured vehicle traffic flow. So how did they
program an 8008
earlier without having one?
Well, when Paul Allen was a student at WSU he had actually tried to create a
simulator on the IBM mainframe there, but he wasn't familiar enough with
mainframes to make it work. When they later got a summer job at a company that
used DEC minicomputers, Paul was able to create a simulator of the
Intel 8008 on the DEC computer. Being intimately familiar with DECs
from the ground up, and having the Intel
manual for the
8008, Paul had written a program on the DEC which would simulate the
exact operation of the Intel chip.
Then Bill
Gates was able to use this simulator to write the program which ran
their Traf-o-Data computer.
Having developed this software tool previously, they used it again to create a
simulator on another DEC computer at Harvard,
this time for the
Intel 8080. The Basic language they didn't actually write from scratch.
Basic had been released into the public domain, so they used bits and pieces
from various dialects of different versions of Basic to come up with their own
to run on the Altair. This was a frantic few weeks, while they both worked and
attended school, and spent their evenings in the school's computer labs. Then,
still having never touched an Altair computer, Paul Allen flew to meet
Ed Roberts at
MITS in Albuquerque with a paper
tape of their just completed version of Basic to try out on the Altair 8800.
And miraculously it worked the first time.
Finally there was usable software to make this computer really useful, and to
change the world. Paul Allen quit his job and went to work at
MITS. Bill
Gates soon dropped out of Harvard
and moved to Albuquerque too. They
authorized MITS
to sell their Basic as part of the Altair kit. They also retained the rights to
market it themselves. A lot of controversy arose over whether it was really
theirs to sell in the first place, as the boys had used government funded
computers to develop their Basic on, and as Basic was in the public domain.
Many of the early hackers fiercely resented this, and early copies of Altair
Basic were pirated and passed from user to user.
Gates and Allen eventually formed their own company, Micro Soft - originally
spelled as two words - there in Albuquerque.
Within months, they were modifying their Basic to run on other early
microcomputers. They got into a law suit with Ed Roberts
over the rights to Basic, and eventually won. Ed Roberts
sold out and retired from the industry he had started himself within a year,
and is now a country doctor in Georgia. Microsoft began doing business with
other emerging companies, and next week's show is
titled "Send in the clones."