Computing gets personal - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 147

write the code for the decimal arithmetic operations required for BASIC, they
recruited a fellow Harvard student named Monte Davidoff. That January and
February, the three worked until late every night and through all the week-
ends. Their BASIC interpreter was finished in just eight weeks, and Allen flew
to Albuquerque for its first encounter with the real Altair hardware. To the
amazement of Roberts and his engineers, the 8080 BASIC interpreter devel-
oped by Gates and Allen ran the first time. The two friends signed a licensing
agreement with MITS in July 1975 and needed a name for their partnership.
They decided on Micro-Soft, for Micro processors and Soft ware, although they
were not consistent about having the hyphen. In November 1976, the name
of their company was registered with the state of New Mexico as Microsoft
Corporation ( B.8.3 ).
It was the unique technical experience of Allen and Gates, together with
their PDP-10 simulator and development tools, that enabled them to beat sea-
soned professional software engineers and university computer scientists in
developing the first usable software for the Altair. Their BASIC interpreter
packed many features and impressive performance into a very small amount of
memory. Paul Ceruzzi summarized their achievements:
The BASIC they wrote for the Altair, with its skillful combination of features
taken from Dartmouth and from Digital Equipment Corporation, was the key
to Gates's and Allen's success in establishing a personal computer software
industry. 9
By 1979, Microsoft's BASIC interpreter became the first microprocessor soft-
ware product to surpass a million dollars in sales ( Fig. 8.7 ).
The Homebrew Computer Club and Apple
The arrival of the Altair stimulated the electronic hobbyist community
to make microprocessor-based personal computers a reality. Computer clubs
sprang up all over the United States including, most famously, the Homebrew
Computer Club in Silicon Valley. In the early years of the personal computer,
B.8.3. This photograph of thirteen of the original fifteen Microsoft staff was taken in
Albuquerque on 7 December 1978. Top row, left to right: Steve Wood, programmer;
Bob Wallace, production manager-designer; Jim Lane, project manager. Middle row, left
to right: Bob O'Rear, mathematician; Bob Greenberg, programmer; Marc McDonald,
programmer and Microsoft's first employee; Gordon Letwin, programmer. Bottom row,
left to right: Bill Gates, cofounder; Andrea Lewis, technical writer; Marla Wood, book-
keeper, married to Steve Wood; and Paul Allen, cofounder. Allen left Microsoft in 1983
and is now owner of the Seattle Seahawks, winners of the 2014 NFL Super Bowl. Two
employees were not in the photograph. Ric Weiland was house hunting in preparation
for Microsoft's move to Seattle, and Miriam Lubow was unable to make it into town for
the photograph because of a rare snowstorm in Albuquerque that day.