Altair BASIC
The title page of the assembly language code that produced Altair BASIC
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| Original author(s) | Micro-Soft |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Monte Davidoff |
| Initial release | 2.0 (4K and 8K editions) July 1, 1975 |
| Stable release |
5.0 / 14 July 1978
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| Platform | Altair 8800 |
Altair BASIC was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASIC was the start of the Microsoft BASIC product range.
Bill Gates recalls that, when he and Paul Allen read about the Altair in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, they understood that the price of computers would soon drop to the point that selling software for them would be a profitable business. Gates believed that, by providing a BASIC interpreter for the new computer, they could make it more attractive to hobbyists. They contacted MITS founder Ed Roberts, told him that they were developing an interpreter, and asked whether he would like to see a demonstration. This followed the common engineering industry practice of a trial balloon, an announcement of a non-existent product to gauge interest. Roberts agreed to meet them for a demonstration in a few weeks, in March 1975.
Gates and Allen had neither an interpreter nor even an Altair system on which to develop and test one. However, Allen had written an Intel 8008 emulator for their previous venture Traf-O-Data that ran on a PDP-10 time-sharing computer. He adapted this emulator based on the Altair programmer guide, and they developed and tested the interpreter on Harvard's PDP-10. Harvard officials were not pleased when they found out, but there was no written policy that covered the use of this computer. Gates and Allen bought computer time from a timesharing service in Boston to complete their BASIC program debugging. They hired Harvard student Monte Davidoff to write floating-point arithmetic routines for the interpreter, a feature not available in many of its competitors.
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