Maybe you didn't do it, but Microsoft is actually older than Apple. While Apple marked its 49th birthday earlier this week on April 1, Microsoft will celebrate its 50th anniversary on April 4. To commemorate the event, the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, published the source code of the very first product of Microsoft, Altair Basic.
The history of the product begins with the computer credited with the start of the personal computer revolution, the Mits Altair 8800. (Yeah yeah yeah, I know what you think: “And the Apple II? I thought it was igamesnews!” Even PCworld said that it is the biggest PC of all time!) But the Altair 8800 has a unique place in history. When it was presented on the coverage of the January 1975 issue of Popular electronicsPassionate people around the world were enthusiastic about his potential, notably Bill Gates and Paul Allen, then Harvard students.
Popular electronics
Gates and Allen thought that Altair 8800 was a sign that the “PC revolution was imminent”, as Gates says. They have decided to create a version of Basic which can work on the Altair – Basic, for you, the young Whippersnappers who pay too much attention to these sacred toktoks or what you call, is a computer language designed for people with, in the words of Gates, “no computer experience”. Basic on an Altair 8800 would broaden the device market and bring the personal calculation of the masses closer.
Gates details some of the things they had to do to make Altair Basic a real product, in particular not having real access to the Intel 8080 chip which was in the Altair 8800, how to manage the limitations of memory (you thought that 8 GB was squat, try 256 bytes!), And rush to make a tight delay. Finally, they concluded a license agreement with Mits, and Micro-Soft (the name was originally a link) was born.
As the story says, Steve Wozniak saw the Altair 8800 Running Gates of the Gates at a meeting of the Homebrew Electronics Club. However, the Intel chip was too expensive, so he wrote a new version of Altair Basic de Gates for the cheaper MOS 6502 chip, which has become Apple I with the help of a guy by the name of Steve Jobs. A few years later, they released The largest PC of all time, Apple IIWell, you probably know the rest. If you don't, here is a summary.
But return to Microsoft. The Altair Basic Source Code is available for PDF download, covering 157 pages. Gates is “super proud of the way it has proven” and given what Altair Basic has led, he should be. If you are a developer or a computer geek, it's worth it. If you want to know more about Bill Gates before Microsoft, read his autobiography, Source code: my beginnings.
Microsoft / Bill Gates
