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                 Bill Gates on Microsoft's Original Source Code

   Adam Engst

   At his Gates Notes blog, [1]Bill Gates commemorates the 50th
   anniversary of Microsoft with a story about the company's first code:

     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 [Allen] 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.

   The detail of this story that I hadn't remembered is that they didn't
   have access to the chip. Instead, Paul Allen wrote an Intel 8080
   simulator on Harvard's PDP-10 mainframe so they could develop and test
   their BASIC interpreter without having actual Altair hardware. It was a
   technical feat, but Harvard wasn't amused at the use of academic
   resources for commercial purposes.

   The university didn't fare so badly in the end. Bill Gates and Steve
   Ballmer have since donated about $85 million to Harvard, and the Bill &
   Melinda Gates Foundation has donated another $103 million for medical
   and educational research.

   Along with the first-hand tale and grainy black-and-white photos, I was
   charmed by how mousing over the text briefly replaces letters with
   non-alphabetic characters, turning the post into interactive ASCII art
   that cleverly evokes the character-based displays of the time.

   [2]Read original article

References

   1. https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code
   2. https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code

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