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Bill Gates on the Creation of Microsoft, and the Source Code for Its First Product
Bill Gates, commemorating Microsoft’s 50th anniversary: The story of how Microsoft came to be begins with, of all things, a magazine. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured an Altair 8800 on the cover. The Altair 8800, created by a small electronics company called MITS, was a groundbreaking personal computer kit that promised to bring computing power to hobbyists. When Paul and I saw that cover, we knew two things: the PC revolution was imminent, and we wanted to get in on the ground floor. At the time, personal computers were practically non- existent. Paul and I knew that creating software that let people program the Altair could revolutionize the way people interacted with these machines. So, we reached out to Ed Roberts, the founder of MITS, and told him we had a version of the programming language BASIC for the chip that the Altair 8800 ran on. There was just one problem: We didn’t. It was time to get to work. At the bottom Gates links to a printout of the original source code for the BASIC interpreter, in extensively commented assembly language. Amongst all of his other accomplishments, Bill Gates was one hell of a programmer. ★
Bill Gates, commemorating Microsoft’s 50th anniversary:
The story of how Microsoft came to be begins with, of all things, a magazine. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured an Altair 8800 on the cover. The Altair 8800, created by a small electronics company called MITS, was a groundbreaking personal computer kit that promised to bring computing power to hobbyists. When Paul and I saw that cover, we knew two things: the PC revolution was imminent, and we wanted to get in on the ground floor.
At the time, personal computers were practically non- existent. Paul and I knew that creating software that let people program the Altair could revolutionize the way people interacted with these machines. So, we reached out to Ed Roberts, the founder of MITS, and told him we had a version of the programming language BASIC for the chip that the Altair 8800 ran on.
There was just one problem: We didn’t.
It was time to get to work.
At the bottom Gates links to a printout of the original source code for the BASIC interpreter, in extensively commented assembly language. Amongst all of his other accomplishments, Bill Gates was one hell of a programmer.
