Bill Gates: Altair 8800 Concepts

The Road Ahead

by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson · 15 Nov 1995 · 317pp · 101,074 words

Waggener, and Ann Winblad. For their incisive review comments, thanks to Stephen Arnold, Steve Ballmer, Harvey Berger, Paul Carroll, Mike Delman, Kimberly Ellwanger, Brian Fleming, Bill Gates, Sr., Melinda Gates, Bernie Gifford, Bob Gomulkiewicz, Meg Greenfield, Collins Hemingway, Jack Hitt, Rita Jacobs, Erik Lacitis, Mich Matthews, Scott Miller, Craig Mundie, Rick

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Black Comedy, some students were heard muttering, "Why did they pick the computer guy?" That's still the way I sometimes get identified. 1968: Bill Gates (Standing) and Paul Allen working at the computer terminal at Lakeside School. It seems there was a whole generation of us, all over the world

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I caught a look at the future, based my career on what I saw, and I turned out to have been right. But the Bill Gates of nineteen was in a very different position from the one I'm in now. In those days, not only did I have all the

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of a very small computer, not much larger than a toaster oven. It had a name only slightly more dignified than Traf-O-Data: the Altair 8800 ("Altair" was a destination in a Star Trek episode). It was being sold for $397 as a kit. When it was assembled, it had

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. You could get the little lights on the front panel to blink, but that was about all. Part of the problem was that the Altair 8800 lacked software. It couldn't be programmed, which made it more a novelty than a tool. What the Altair did have was an Intel

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than we would have been if we hadn't had those scary baby-sitters. Microsoft started out in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975 because that's where MITS was located. MITS was the tiny company whose Altair 8800 personal-computer kit had been on the cover of Popular Electronics. We worked with

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Compatibility is important. It makes the consumer-electronics and personal-computer businesses thrive. When the PC industry was new, many machines came and went. The Altair 8800 was superseded by the Apple I. Then came the Apple II, the original IBM PC, the Apple Macintosh, IBM PC AT, 386 and 486 PCs

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber · 3 Oct 2024 · 424pp · 123,730 words

(Photo courtesy of SoftBank) 12. Son at the company headquarters in 1990 in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo by The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images) 13. Son and Bill Gates announcing their joint venture GameBank in June 1995. (Copyright © Nikkei, Inc.) 14. Son and Rupert Murdoch at a JSkyB press conference on 17 December 1996

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Dolotta, Polish-born computer programmer at Bell Labs, Masa’s first ‘eyes and ears’ in the US Bill Gates, co-founder Microsoft, long-time friend of Masa Kazuhiko Nishi, founder of ASCII software, partner to Bill Gates, Masa’s great rival in Japan Jack Ma, co-founder and longtime CEO of Alibaba, member of

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the richest man on the planet. His $70bn paper fortune exceeded that of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch. SoftBank, the software-distribution business turned media-tech conglomerate he founded in 1981, was valued at $200bn: less than Microsoft but more than Exxon Mobil and General Electric, America’s industrial titans.

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biographies – is almost identical to Bill Gates’s story of being shown a copy of Popular Electronics magazine in January 1975. Gates, then a second-year student at Harvard, was so blown away reading about the Altair 8800 microprocessor that he dropped out and co-founded his own company – Microsoft – in Albuquerque, New Mexico. ‘

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, ensuring nobody lost face.12 Yet at this moment of triumph, a mortal threat to SoftBank appeared in the form of an alliance between Bill Gates and representatives from the 14 largest computer and home appliance manufacturers in Japan. Gates said he wanted to end the balkanization of Japan’s computer

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own software and operating system specifications. Masa was taken aback. He too favoured standardization, but Microsoft’s move undercut his hard-earned position as intermediary-in-chief between software buyer and seller in Japan. Bill Gates was the global face of the computer industry. But he was also a geek with a

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very, very few people in Japan who could do that.’15 On 16 June 1983, Bill Gates and Nishi unveiled their plans for standardization under a system called MSX. From now on, software written in Microsoft’s BASIC programming language could run on computers produced by any hardware manufacturer that paid the relevant licence

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on building your own company, said Jobs, a fellow college drop-out.1 Kotick went to see Masa on the advice of another powerful mentor, Bill Gates. What struck him was how Masa never stopped smiling – or talking. The Japanese spoke English with such self-confidence it defied belief that he

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lives – and an entire empire. An educated minority in the US nevertheless remained fascinated by Japan and its commercial potential. Many worked in technology. Bill Gates, who first visited Japan in the 1970s, still remembers how baffling the experience was, and how useful Masa proved to be as a cultural interpreter

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its accounting or profits track record. Besides the business was under threat from yet more disruptive change, this time in the enterprise software market where Bill Gates was determined to establish its new Windows system as the industry standard. The wild card was Novell, based in Provo, Utah, a company populated

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with Novell, Masa continued to butter up Bill Gates, who had since had a spectacular falling out with Nishi over his reluctance to focus on software rather than hardware. Masa jumped in, securing an interview with the Microsoft boss in his own magazine in Japan. Microsoft chose SoftBank as their distributor (though not

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photography magazines, later diversifying into computer publishing. Ziff’s titles like Popular Electronics – the magazine that had made such an impact on Masa and Bill Gates at the start of their careers – produced reviews which could make or break the launch of new products. After a ten-minute meeting with Masa

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Aged only 36, he was worth $2bn. A four-page profile later appeared in the Gekkan Keieijuku magazine, headlined ‘The Ambitions of Son Masayoshi, the Bill Gates of Japan’. Underneath the editors published a photo of Masa with a caption which, by Japanese standards, came close to breathless: ‘Son Masayoshi, CEO

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top of the current year’s booking fee. ‘It was so expensive. Those guys had it so monetized, they pushed it to the limit,’ says Bill Gates, a regular visitor. ‘Every year the companies would say: “Are we going to fuck these guys and set up a competitor show?”’ Nobody fancied

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standing in a two-hour line with a badge waiting to get into the convention’.10 Soon he would be high-fiving on stage with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He didn’t care about short-term profits or cashing out like Sheldon Adelson; he was cementing SoftBank’s place in

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During this frenetic period, old friends and business partners like Jordy Levy detected a change in Masa’s behaviour. He mixed with the likes of Bill Gates, GE’s Jack Welch and Oracle’s Larry Ellison on the golf links and was no longer available for a slap-up dinner. ‘He had

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insurance and venture capital. In January 2003, Masa appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Once he had strutted on stage as Japan’s Bill Gates. Now he was a fallen idol, excluded from the conference’s official list of ‘top business leaders’ in attendance. Nevertheless SoftBank’s boss turned

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. When Masa pushed a few buttons, the floor tilted, an ocean-scented breeze swept the room and a light rain fell from the ceiling. Bill Gates, a keen golfer, was impressed when he paid a visit.7 Masa’s new luxury home in central Tokyo was on a different scale. The

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Top of the list is anything to do with his personal life.’ In the good times, Masa revelled in his public role as Japan’s Bill Gates. But he avoided conspicuous displays of wealth. Stories about an extravagant new home would have sat awkwardly with the public image of a man indifferent

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into his circle older men like Sasaki and Omori who saw in him a younger version of themselves. Now the man acclaimed as Japan’s Bill Gates risked turning into a fossil and a bottleneck for growth.1 Masa had flirted briefly with the succession question when he recruited Nikesh Arora.

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enduring loyalty going back to the iPhone partnership. Sunil Mittal was asked for $2bn but politely declined. Masa’s next call was Bill Gates, no longer in charge at Microsoft but actively running his own charitable foundation. When Gates called and asked if Masa would put $150m into his planned $1bn Breakthrough

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was the Second Coming [of Christ],’ says Jordy Levy, the New York venture investor who’d just left SoftBank. ‘Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, all rolled into one.’5 Masa’s multi-billion dollar pledge to WeWork fitted a pattern of seemingly irrational decisions to invest mind-blowing amounts

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witnessed a corresponding strong share price. Masa bristled at the mention of his one-time hero and golf partner. ‘These are one-business guys. Bill Gates just started Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg started FaceBook. I am involved in 100 businesses and I control the entire [tech] ecosystem.’ Masa continued: ‘These are not

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later, Omori was ousted. 11. Son with his lifelong mentor, the legendary Japanese computer engineer Tadashi Sasaki, or ‘Doctor Rocket’, early 1980s. 12. ‘The Bill Gates of Japan’: already at 33, Son was the country’s no. 1 software distributor – here giving one of his rousing speeches to SoftBank staff. 13

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Ibid., pp. 23–4 11 Masa, interview, 10 February 2023 12 Inoue, Aiming High, pp. 30–31 13 Masa, interview, 10 February 2023 14 Bill Gates, interview with author, 8 July 2022 15 Tadashi Sasaki autobiography, Waga Kōshisai: Kansha Hou’on no Ki, Zaikai Tsūshin Sha, 2005, pp. 49–53 16

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Gensōkyoku, p. 80 11 Ōshita, Son Masayoshi, pp. 240–41; Sano, Anpon, p. 223; Kodama, Fantasia, p. 81 12 Kodama, Gensōkyoku, pp. 81–2 13 Bill Gates, interview with author, 8 July 2022 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ōshita, Son Masayoshi, pp. 242–7 17 Takita, Internet Zaibatsu Keiei, pp. 175–80

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author’s two private meetings with MBZ several years earlier 12 Account based on a person present at the meeting, speaking off the record 13 Bill Gates, interview with author, 8 July 2022 14 This account was provided by a person present who spoke off the record 15 Two sources speaking

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thank Ron Fisher, a long-time US collaborator, for agreeing to several valuable interviews. Alibaba’s Joe Tsai, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, and Bill Gates of Microsoft offered generous sit-down time. Rajeev Misra, Marcelo Claure and Nikesh Arora were also very helpful. They had their differences while working for SoftBank,

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Columbia Pictures, 80, 101, 119–20 Comcast, 240 Compuserve, 102 computer technology: AI-driven computer graphics chips, 304–5, 308, 323, 329–31, 334–5; Altair 8800 microprocessor, 33; ARM chip, 244–5, 247–8, 253, 265–6, 308, 323, 329–30; chips as scarce and most crucial resource, 331; Comdex (

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), 27–8; Den Fujita’s influence on, 24–6, 33; and Fukushima nuclear disaster, 213–22, 223, 298; funding of Japanese scholars overseas, 102*; and Bill Gates, 66, 72, 73, 77, 266–7; Gates on, 66; giant private complex in Chiba, 324; and Lex Greensill, 293–4, 319–20; growth potential

Computer: A History of the Information Machine

by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger · 29 Jul 2013 · 528pp · 146,459 words

microprocessors for full-scale computers emerged gradually, and it was not until 1977 that the first personal computers hit the market. COURTESY OF INTEL. The Altair 8800 (left), announced in January 1975, was the first microprocessor-based computer. It was sold as a kit to electronics hobbyists for $397. Note that

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the Altair 8800 was termed a minicomputer—the phrase personal computer had not yet been coined. COURTESY OF ROBERT VOELKER. Video games were made possible by the advent

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point-and-click mouse, which subsequently became universal on desktop computers. COURTESY OF SRI INTERNATIONAL. Bill Gates has engendered more interest and controversy than any other figure in the history of the computer. He co-founded Microsoft, which developed the MS-DOS and Windows operating systems installed on hundreds of millions of

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is its focus on a handful of individuals, portrayed as visionaries who saw the future and made it happen: Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates figure prominently in this genre. By contrast, IBM and the established computer firms are usually portrayed as dinosaurs: slow-moving, dim-witted, deservedly

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groups, with such different perspectives, was the arrival of the first hobby computer, the Altair 8800. THE ALTAIR 8800 In January 1975 the first microprocessor-based computer, the Altair 8800, was announced on the front cover of Popular Electronics. The Altair 8800 is often described as the first personal computer. This was true only in the sense

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that its price was so low that it could be realistically bought by an individual. In every other sense the Altair 8800 was a traditional minicomputer. Indeed, the blurb on the front cover of Popular Electronics described it as exactly that: “Exclusive

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! Altair 8800. The most powerful minicomputer project ever presented—can be built for under $400.” The Altair 8800 closely followed the electronics hobbyist marketing model: it was inexpensive ($397) and was sold by mail order as

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a kit that the enthusiast had to assemble himself. In the tradition of the electronics hobbyist kit, the Altair 8800 did not always work when the enthusiast had constructed it; and even if it did work, it did not do anything very useful. The computer

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no way to attach a device such as a teletype to the machine to turn it into a useful computer system. The only way the Altair 8800 could be programmed was by entering programs in pure binary code by flicking the hand switches on the front. When loaded, the program would

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run; but the only evidence of its execution was the change in the shifting pattern of the lights on the front. This limited the Altair 8800 to programs that only a dedicated computer hobbyist would ever be able to appreciate. Entering the program was extraordinarily tedious, taking several minutes—but

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as there were only 256 bytes of memory, there was a limit to the complexity of programs that could be attempted. The Altair 8800 was produced by a tiny Albuquerque, New Mexico, electronics kit supplier, Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS). The firm had originally been set up by

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general-purpose computer for some time, it was only when the more obvious calculator market faded away that he decided to take the gamble. The Altair 8800 was unprecedented and in no sense a “rational” product; it would appeal only to an electronics hobbyist of the most dedicated kind, and even

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that was not guaranteed. Despite its many shortcomings, the Altair 8800 was the grit around which the pearl of the personal-computer industry grew during the next two years. The limitations of the

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Altair 8800 created the opportunity for small-time entrepreneurs to develop “add-on” boards so that extra memory, conventional teletypes, and audiocassette recorders (for permanent data storage) could be added to the basic machine. Almost all of these start-up companies consisted

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of two or three people—mostly computer hobbyists hoping to turn their pastime to profit. A few other entrepreneurs developed software for the Altair 8800. The most important of the early software entrepreneurs was Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft. Although his

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1973. However, he soon found that his studies did not engage his interest, and he continued to program by night. The launch of the Altair 8800 in 1975 transformed Gates’s and Allen’s lives. Almost as soon as they heard of the machine, they recognized the software opportunity it represented

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and would therefore be the ideal vehicle for the personal-computer market. Roberts was enthusiastic, not least because BASIC would need a lot more memory to run than was normally provided with the Altair 8800; he expected to be able to sell extra memory with a high margin of profit. Gates and Allen

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abandoned his formal education. During the next two years, literally hundreds of small firms entered the microcomputer software business, and Microsoft was by no means the most prominent. The Altair 8800, and the add-on boards and software that were soon available for it, transformed hobby electronics in a way not seen

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the first quarter of 1975, MITS received over $1 million in orders for the Altair 8800 and launched its first “worldwide” conference. Speakers at the conference included Ed Roberts, Gates and Allen as the developers of Altair BASIC, and the computer-liberation guru Ted Nelson. At the meeting Gates launched a personal

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computer professionals; they supplied complete computers, add-on boards, peripherals, or software. Within months of its initial launch at the beginning of 1975, the Altair 8800 had itself been eclipsed by dozens of new models produced by firms such as Applied Computer Technology, IMSAI, North Star, Cromemco, and Vector. THE RISE

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industry, up to that point he had not realized that they could be used to build general-purpose computers and had not heard of the Altair 8800. But he had actually built a computer, which was more than could be said of most Homebrew members at that date, and he found

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and remarkable business acumen, he owed almost everything to being in the right place at the right time. The IBM entourage arrived at Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s Microsoft headquarters in July 1980. It was then a tiny (thirty-eight-person) company located in rented offices in downtown Seattle. It is

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personal-computer industry progressed, the garage gave way to the college dorm room as the symbolic locus for IT entrepreneurial activity. Freshman Bill Gates left Harvard University to co-found Microsoft, freshman Shawn Fanning left Northeastern University to co-found Napster, and freshman Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University to found Facebook. (Facebook

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” as background music on television commercials. In major cities theaters were hired and video screens installed so that Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates could deliver his address to the waiting world. When we left Microsoft in the last chapter, in 1980, it was a tiny outfit with thirty-eight employees and annual sales

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including London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Sydney, Singapore, and Mexico City. The production included videos, slides, laser lights, “surround sound,” and a speech by Bill Gates, who proclaimed Windows 3 “a major milestone” in the history of software, saying that it “puts the ‘personal’ back into millions of MS-DOS-based

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, mainly for business information and high-value publications. In the consumer arena, two of the industry leaders in personal-computer software, Gary Kildall and Bill Gates, played critical roles in establishing a market for CD-ROM media. Both Kildall and Gates hit on the idea of the CD-ROM encyclopedia as

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owners, Sears and IBM, decided to sell the network in 1996, and it thereafter faded from sight. Microsoft, on the other hand, decided to cut its losses on MSN. In December 1995 Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would “embrace and extend” the Internet; it “was willing to sacrifice one child (MSN) to promote

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the most useful on the early years to be Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews’s Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry (1994), James Wallace and Jim Erickson’s Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (1992), and Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper’s The Making of

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the individual into a capable, creative person”: Turner 2006, p. 84. Page 234“was one of the bibles”: Jobs 2005, p. 1. Page 235“Exclusive! Altair 8800”: Popular Electronics, January 1975, p. 33; reproduced in Langlois 1992, p. 10. Page 240“nit-picking technical debates”: Moritz 1984, p. 136. Page 241three

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The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. New York: Viking. Swisher, Kara. 1998. AOL.COM: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web. New York: Times Books. Taviss, Irene. 1970. The Computer Impact. Englewood Cliffs,

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Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. New York: Viking. Wallace, James, and Jim Erickson. 1992. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. New York: John Wiley. Wang, An, with Eugene Linden. 1986. Lessons: An Autobiography. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Watkins, Ralph. 1984.

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reservations systems, 123, 132, 152–157, 177, 203 ALGOL programming language, 174 Algorithms, 170–171, 294 Allen, Paul, 236–237, 246 Allyn, Stanley, 31 Altair 8800, 195 (photo), 235–238 Alto computer, 260–261, 296 Amateur Computer Society (ACS), 218–219 Amateurs, 230, 231, 232–238, 239–241, 242 Amazon.com

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magazine, 257 Pender, Harold, 79, 81, 83 Peripherals, 121, 125, 129, 135, 218 Perot, Ross, 135, 178 Personal computers Altair 8800, 195 (photo), 235–238 applications software for, 243–245 BASIC as programming language for, 192, 207 CD-ROM disks and drives, 267–269, 273–274 consumer networks, 270–274 Dell’s

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer

by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger · 19 Oct 2014 · 459pp · 140,010 words

year and a half—the end of the ninth grade and all of the tenth. I tried to be normal, the best I could. –Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft Corporation Had the personal-computer revolution waited for action from the mainframe-computer and minicomputer companies, the PC might still be a thing of

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to send to Popular Electronics. It was going to appear on the cover, so they made sure it looked especially attractive. * * * Figure 17. The MITS Altair 8800, assembled The default input and output for the Altair computer were the switches and lights on the front panel. (Courtesy of Intel Corp.) Because Bill

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began to suspect that he’d made a terrible mistake. All Hell Breaks Loose PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH! World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models…ALTAIR 8800 –Popular Electronics cover, January 1975 Ed Roberts was still worried about his investment even as the first orders came rolling in. But within a week

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those “manifold uses” were. That didn’t stop Roberts’s phone from ringing almost nonstop. Electronic hobbyists were happily buying promises. * * * Figure 19. The MITS Altair 8800, unassembled Early purchasers of the MITS Altair received a bag of parts and assembly instructions. (Courtesy of David Bunnell) One of the promises customers bought

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ad, which ran in Popular Electronics and Scientific American. (Courtesy of David Bunnell) Putting It Together Every good idea was half-executed at MITS. –Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft Compared with mainframes and minicomputers, the Altair was seriously deficient. It lacked any means of permanent storage. Users could put information into the machine

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tape and then loaded back into memory later on. When Allen first demonstrated BASIC to Roberts, he brought it to MITS on paper tape. For a while, paper tape was the major means of distributing the language. Bill Gates would later curse those paper tapes because they provided the medium for widespread illegal

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. Named the Altair 680b and attractively priced at $293, that computer was substantially different from the original Altair 8800. Components from the 8800 could not be used in the 680b, nor could the original Altair BASIC. When the new computer magazine Byte unveiled Southwest Tech’s 6800 computer in November 1975, the announcement

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was hired to write 6800 BASIC, were branching out with their versions of BASIC, including developing versions for other companies. The relationship between Microsoft and MITS was becoming less clearly defined as the two companies grew. The fact that Bill Gates had yet to write the disk code for the Altair 8800 didn’t help matters, especially

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Gates checked into a motel with some pens and a stack of yellow legal pads. When he came out, he had finished the disk code. * * * Figure 24. Bill Gates Gates temporarily abandoned his glasses while speaking at the first

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was soon to lose an important employee. Paul Allen was restless. Microsoft was becoming a more serious enterprise, and Allen was eager to take control of his own destiny. Convinced that MITS’s best days were past, he and Bill Gates began focusing all their attention on their own company. Mark Chamberlain moved

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second. –Ted Nelson, computer visionary, philosopher, and critic During the two and a half years between the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover story announcing the Altair 8800 and the May 1977 sale of MITS to Pertec, a new industry was on the rise. The Altair announcement triggered both technological and social change

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a good deal on CBASIC that it didn’t even consider also buying MBASIC, the BASIC programming language that Bill Gates and Paul Allen were selling under the company name Microsoft. Later, when IMSAI did begin buying software from Microsoft, Seymour Rubinstein handled the negotiations from start to finish. Rubinstein was a remorseless negotiator and

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brought all his skills to bear in dealing with Microsoft’s young president, Bill Gates. Gates left their meeting thinking that he

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Adventure Land and Pirate Adventure were serving to introduce computers to the average person. Other software companies also began selling adventure games. Even Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft, who until then had shown no professional interest in game software, released a version of Adventure. In addition to Star Trek and Adventure

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Digital Research faced any serious competition. The programmers who would provide that competition were still working at MITS in Albuquerque. Getting Down to BASIC If anyone had run over Bill Gates, the microcomputer industry would have been set back a couple of years. –Dick Heiser, early computer retailer While it’s true that

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calculations, and stuff like that. And your home computer is kind of small, not too much memory. Maybe it’s a Mark-8 or an Altair 8800 with less than 4K bytes and a TV Typewriter for input and output. You would like to use it for homework, math recreations, and games

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ambitious BASIC was also in the works. In the fall of 1974, Bill Gates had left Washington for Harvard University. Gates’s parents had always wanted him to go to law school, and now they felt finally he was on the right track. * * * Figure 39. Paul Allen and Bill Gates Allen (left) and Gates founded Microsoft

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would win a prize. The journalists were free to use their own computers and any programming software they liked. Microsoft’s new QuickBasic would be represented, and the programmer using it would be Bill Gates. It had been nearly four years since Gates had written code. The last time was when he completed

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Pascal, and Duntemann knew Turbo Pascal inside and out. When the contest was over, Bill Gates and QuickBasic had won. It was a crazy thing, an outrageous PR gamble, but it had paid off. The message was clear: Microsoft was run by a sharp, highly competitive businessman who also happened to have helped

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office-products division In the years since they had left Albuquerque for their native Bellevue, Washington, Bill Gates and Paul Allen had established a successful software business specializing in programming languages for personal computers. The BASIC they had originally written for the MITS Altair was still their most popular product, a standard in

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the obvious choice. Osborne had two widely used versions to choose from. Because the two BASICs had complementary virtues, he decided to offer them both and made deals with Gordon Eubanks for CBASIC and Bill Gates for Microsoft BASIC. Osborne also needed a word processor. In 1980, the man with the leading word processor was

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computer, even if it was a self-contained machine for one individual’s use. It was priced as a minicomputer. * * * Figure 82. Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates Simonyi came from Xerox PARC to oversee development of Microsoft’s most profitable products. He became a billionaire and was the first space tourist. (Courtesy of

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-IBM venture. Taking a Meeting with IBM In July of 1980, Bill Gates, busily developing a BASIC for Atari, received a phone call from a representative of IBM. He was surprised, but not greatly so. IBM had called once before about buying a Microsoft product, but the deal had fallen through. However, this communication

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Stanford University’s MBA program but had dropped out to start making money sooner. Ballmer had been glad to join Microsoft. He was enthusiastic about the little software company, and he liked Bill Gates. At Harvard, he had convinced Gates to join his men’s club. As an initiation rite, he dressed his

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game. As they started working together at Microsoft in 1980, Gates found he still enjoyed discussing things with his friend, who quickly became one of his closest business confidants, and he naturally turned to him after IBM’s call. * * * Figure 85. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates Gates’s ebullient college buddy would go

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was also open in another way. Gates managed to get IBM to agree to let Microsoft sell its operating system to other hardware manufacturers. IBM didn’t understand what a wealth-creation machine they were handing to Bill Gates. Although pressure to finish the software was extreme, Gates was confident in his ability

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’s editor to protest the publication of “rumors.” When IBM came out with its personal computer, fortunes would be won and lost. Bill Gates wanted to be sure nothing prevented Microsoft from being among the winners. The IBM Personal Computer When, on August 12, 1981, IBM announced its first personal computer, it radically

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night and open your mail and find computer magazines or else you’re not going to be on the same wavelength as the people [at Microsoft]. –Bill Gates, 1983 Microsoft became the dominant company in the personal-computer industry in the 1980s, surpassing IBM in influence, and its founders became billionaires. But as the

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1980s began, Microsoft and Bill Gates were known only within the tight community of personal-computer companies. In 1981 the company’s business focused on programming languages, with some application software

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send an email message directly to billg and know that Bill G. himself would read it. But Microsoft was far from a democracy. The flattened communication structure was a double-edged sword. Although displeasing Bill Gates was death, getting positive feedback from billg on your work or ideas was money in the bank

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packaging its products were a warehouse nightmare and one more indication that all was not rosy inside Bill’s empire. If Microsoft reflected Bill Gates’s personality and values, its organization could have been modeled on Bill’s personal life. He ate fast food, neglected to shower, and had trouble

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and that Microsoft was claiming Windows would not compete with OS/2 when competition was exactly the plan. That was all true, eventually. IBM announced that OS/2 would be released in two versions, the more sophisticated of which would be sold exclusively by IBM. That wasn’t news Bill Gates wanted to

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lasted only into 1992, it hardly mattered to the direction and atmosphere of the company. Microsoft was Bill Gates’s baby. As Gates approached 40, neither he nor Microsoft seemed to lose any vitality. The break with IBM invigorated Microsoft and left IBM floundering. Windows was finally getting positive reviews while IBM’s OS/2

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the Apple I. It’s just that sometimes the establishment needs a kick in the pants. –Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape In 1994, Microsoft was riding high and Bill Gates was a billionaire. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t still driven by fear. No matter that he was the richest person

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be known, but Compaq removed the program. Compaq also backed down two years later, when Microsoft threatened to stop selling it Windows unless Compaq included Microsoft’s Internet browser on its machines. Microsoft had become a powerhouse and Bill Gates was not reluctant to use that power. The Internet Threat In the 1980s, online systems

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Macworld Expo in January 1997. As Jobs stood on stage, the face of Bill Gates appeared on the enormous screen behind him, looking down like Big Brother in the movie version of George Orwell’s 1984. Jobs announced that Microsoft was investing $150 million in Apple. Jobs recovered by assuring the crowd that

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and the agreement that Apple would make Microsoft’s web browser its browser of choice. Microsoft was enlisting Apple in its war to control the key software used to browse the Internet. In the same year that his image was looming ominously over the Macworld show, Bill Gates started the William H. Gates Foundation

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition

by Steven Levy · 18 May 2010 · 598pp · 183,531 words

Who’s Who: The Wizards and Their Machines Bob Albrecht. Founder of People’s Computer Company who took visceral pleasure in exposing youngsters to computers. Altair 8800. The pioneering microcomputer that galvanized hardware hackers. Building this kit made you learn hacking. Then you tried to figure out what to do with it

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Homebrew Computer Club meeting. Richard Garriott. Astronaut’s son who, as Lord British, created the Ultima world on computer disks. Bill Gates. Cocky wizard and Harvard dropout who wrote Altair BASIC, and complained when hackers copied it. Bill Gosper. Horowitz of computer keyboards, master math and LIFE hacker at MIT AI lab

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1975, Solomon published the article, with the address of MITS, and the offer to sell a basic kit for $397. On the cover of that issue was a phonied-up picture of the Altair 8800, which was a blue box half the size of an air conditioner, with an enticing front panel

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red LEDs. (This front panel would be changed to an even spiffier variation, anchored by a chrome strip with the MITS logo and the legend “Altair 8800” in the variegated type font identified with computer readouts.) Those who read the article would discover that there were only 256 bytes (a “byte”

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octal. Hell, what did it matter? It was a start. It was a computer. Around the People’s Computer Company, the announcement of the Altair 8800 was cause for celebration. Everybody had known about the attempts to get a system going around the less powerful Intel 8008 chip; the unofficial sister

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the machine. In his review of the machine in PCC, which ran with a picture of lightning striking a small town, he wrote: “The Altair 8800 has two things (at least) going for it: it’s here and it works. These facts alone will guarantee that it is THE amateur computer

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down from Berkeley in Lee’s battered pickup truck. Bob Albrecht had come over to give the group his blessing, and to show off the Altair 8800 that MITS had loaned PCC. Tom Pittman, a free-lance engineer who’d built an improbable homebrew computer around the early Intel 4004 chip,

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, and ran the program again. This time the ZIPs were louder. Dompier was exultant: he had discovered the first input/output device for the Altair 8800 computer. Now the idea was to control the device. Dompier brought his guitar over and figured out that one of the noises the computer made

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in creating new systems and even some applications, it was up to these as yet unorganized hardware hackers to make their own mark on the Altair 8800. Bob Marsh understood that this was the beginning of a new era, and a terrific opportunity. Sitting on the cold floor in Gordon French

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. Indeed, MITS did have a BASIC. It had had the language running since early spring 1975. Not long before MITS began shipping Altairs to computer-starved Popular Electronics readers, Ed Roberts had gotten a phone call from two college students named Paul Allen and Bill Gates. The two teenagers hailed from Seattle

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’d done it. When they called Roberts, they did not mention they were placing the call from Bill Gates’ college dorm room. Roberts was cordial, but warned them that others were thinking of an Altair BASIC; they were welcome to try, though. “We’ll buy from the first guy who shows up

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What happened was that the teletype it was connected to said, READY. Ready to program! “They got very excited,” Bill Gates later said. “Nobody had ever seen the machine do anything.” The BASIC was far from a working version, but it was close enough to completion and its routines were sufficiently clever to

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and the software library in the drawer by the PDP-6 or the Homebrew Club library was that the former was for sale only. Neither Bill Gates nor Ed Roberts believed that software was any kind of sanctified material, meant to be passed around as if it were too holy to

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figured out who, borrowed one of their paper tapes lying on the floor.” The paper tape in question held the current version of Altair BASIC written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Dan Sokol later recalled that vague “someone” coming up to him and, noting that Sokol worked for one of the

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official release. There were two hackers, however, who were far from delighted at this demonstration of sharing and cooperation—Paul Allen and Bill Gates. They had sold their BASIC to MITS on a basis that earned them royalties for every copy sold, and the idea of the hacker community blithely churning out

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copies of their program and giving them away did not seem particularly Utopian. It seemed like stealing. Bill Gates was also upset because the version

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of the idea that computer programs belonged to everybody. It was too much a part of the hacker dream to abandon. Steve Dompier thought that Bill Gates was merely whining. “Ironically, Bill complaining about piracy didn’t stop anything. People still believed, ‘If you got it, you could run it.’ It

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and very inexpensive software.” In a letter sent out to explain the magazine, he elaborated: “There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning ‘ripping off’ software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it’s easier to pay

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said. “Besides, I don’t have managerial skills. I’m more a software person than an electronic engineer.” But after the “software flap” caused by Bill Gates’ letter, Pittman decided to take public action. “Gates was moaning about the ripoffs, and people were saying, ‘If you didn’t charge $150, we

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time-honored practice of sharing all techniques, of refusing to recognize secrets, and of keeping information going in an unencumbered flow. When it was Bill Gates’ Altair BASIC that was under consideration, it was easy to maintain the Hacker Ethic. Now, as major shareholders of companies supporting hundreds of employees, the hackers

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encouraged outsiders to write software. They even enlisted outside firms to help design the thing, firms like Microsoft, headed by Bill Gates (the author of the original software piracy letter, directed at the Homebrew Altair BASIC copiers). Gates wrote the IBM operating system which almost instantly became a new industry standard. It was

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software patents. He believed, and still does, that information should be free. —Steven Levy August 1993 Appendix C. Afterword: 2010 “It’s funny,” says Bill Gates. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. They didn’t

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never seen as opposing values. They are molding the future of the movement. • • • • • • • • Real hackers don’t take vacations. And judging by those standards, Bill Gates is no longer a real hacker. Gates himself admits as much. “I believe in intensity, and I have to totally agree, by objective measures my

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been shaped.” I wonder how a kid today, when computers are ubiquitous and easy to control, could make a similar impact. Could there be a Bill Gates today? “Well, there certainly isn’t the opportunity to bring computers to the masses,” he says. The big bang of the computer revolution has

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—manipulating cell’s genetic code in a way a previous generation of hackers manipulated computer code. “It’s still in the fun stage.” Just ask Bill Gates. If he were a teenager again, he’d be biology hacking. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of

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Eastlake, Doug Englebart, Chris Espinosa, Lee Felsenstein, LeRoy Finkel, Howard Franklin, Bob Frankston, Ed Fredkin, Gordon French, Martin Garetz, Harry Garland, Richard Garriott, Lou Gary, Bill Gates, Bill Godbout, Vincent Golden, Dave Gordon, Ralph Gorin, Dan Gorlin, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Margaret Hamilton, Eric Hammond, John Harris, Brian Harvey, Ted Hoff,

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Shag, Spacewar Garland, Harry, The Homebrew Computer Club, The Homebrew Computer Club Garriott, Owen K., Applefest Garriott, Richard, Applefest, Applefest, Applefest Gates, Bill, Tiny BASIC, Tiny BASIC, Frogger, Afterword: 2010, Afterword: 2010, Afterword: 2010 Gebelli, Nasir, The Brotherhood, Frogger General Electric Science Fair, The Tech Model Railroad Club George Jackson People’s

Commodore: A Company on the Edge

by Brian Bagnall · 13 Sep 2005 · 781pp · 226,928 words

ignored much of the book and focused on Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and IBM. “The PC came out, we changed players, and the whole early history just got lost,” says PET designer Chuck Peddle. Peddle deplores the emphasis on IBM, Apple, and Microsoft at the expense of earlier developers. “None of that is

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new field of technology. In the 1970s, the image of a computer genius was not in the mold of the young hacker. Teenaged tycoons like Bill Gates had not yet filtered into the public consciousness. Instead, the accepted image of a technological genius was a middle-aged man with graying hair and

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play around with my processor.” In time, Seiler acquired a copy of BASIC on a paper tape roll that hobbyists freely shared. “There was a guy in Miami who had an Altair,” he explains. “I got Bill Gates’ original 4K BASIC from him.” Seiler’s friend in Miami had no means for loading the

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return, the man gave Seiler a copy of BASIC. Seiler thought nothing of the pirated copy because there was a weak concept of software ownership in 1975. Then in January 1976, Gates addressed the nascent user community in the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter. “Bill Gates wrote some kind of open letter to some

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Interface Age. Articles and projects appeared in these magazines well into 1979. MOS Technology released the KIM-1 in 1975, the same year as the Altair 8800 computer. The Altair has come to be known as the first personal computer system in North America to herald the new microcomputer revolution. The differences

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slots to insert adapter cards. This design philosophy reduced production costs and thus gave the KIM-1 a major pricing advantage over the Altair. The Altair 8800 used an Intel 8080 chip, which retailed for $360, but inventor Ed Roberts was able to negotiate the price down to $75 each in bulk

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robot Bender, has a 6502 microprocessor for a brain. Futurama, “Fry & the Slurm Factory” (Season 2, Episode 4). [4] Peddle had a chance to ask Bill Gates if he remembered receiving the check. Gates replied, “Yeah, and we really noticed it because almost nobody did [send us a check].” CHAPTER 4 The

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their own software, and BASIC was the simplest path. To acquire BASIC, Commodore would make a deal with a small company called Micro-Soft. At the time, Micro-Soft did not own an operating system. Instead, it sold programming languages, principally its well-regarded version of BASIC. A young Bill Gates led the company. Some

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knew BASIC when Gates was still in * grammar school,” he laughs. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were still new to business. Their company had grown

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and says, ‘I’ve got a BASIC for the 6502 and we’re not finding any customers. Would you like to start marketing it for me?’ It turned out this guy’s name was Rick Wyland.” Wyland had taken the original Intel 8008 code created by Bill Gates and, just for fun, converted

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a MOS Technology guy. His [6502] BASIC was going to be available to other people,” he says. “They liked the extensions I put in, they thought they were a good idea, so they agreed to keep them in as part of their normal BASIC.” At first, Bill Gates was not very involved with the

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write some of the code for the final product. Bill wrote good interrupt driven code that really worked.” In a 1993 interview with the Smithsonian, Bill Gates recalled his early start with Commodore. “…they started with us from the very beginning. Because we helped Chuck Peddle, who was at Commodore at that

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able to do card games because that’s one of the things people did with computers.” Bill Gates is famous for his shrewd business style, but in 1976, he was still learning his craft. The deal for BASIC would ultimately turn into one of the biggest missteps of his early career. From the

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moment Commodore purchased BASIC from Micro-Soft, Commodore could include it in all computer models they happened to make in the years to come, without paying royalties. “As far as I know, Jack Tramiel was the only one who ever got the upper hand on Bill Gates,” says engineer Bob Yannes

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was Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, a book hailed as revolutionary for the time. The book, written in 1974 before the KIM-1 and Altair 8800, envisioned networked computers with libraries of information linked together. At the conference, Nelson gave an impassioned speech about software, criticizing the current state of affairs

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to learn more. After a few minutes at the keyboard, many walked away dazzled by the promise of computers. It was a powerful marketing tool. Bill Gates, in a 1993 interview with the Smithsonian, concludes, “Radio Shack, with its distribution and its name, set the market on fire.” All Commodore had

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piss out of computers on television. It was a hot topical comment.” The PET received better coverage in Popular Science, the magazine that launched the Altair 8800. The editors ran a feature listing the most popular microcomputers of the day, including the Altair 8080, the IMSAI 8048, the Processor Technology Sol, the

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the 4-kilobyte version in favor of the 8-kilobyte version, which cost $795. The opportunity to purchase a computer for personal use seemed incredible. Bill Gates, in a 1993 Smithsonian interview, saw the PET 2001 as a landmark machine for the pricing as much as the technology. “The Commodore machine, the

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to build. Between Mike Markkula at Apple and Jack Tramiel at Commodore, it was clear Apple respected the computer distributors more. In a 1993 interview, Bill Gates identified this strength. “Apple … really went out to computer dealers and did a good job, far better than people like the MITS guys and the

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. He feared his VIC chip was in danger of fading into oblivion. While the engineers were showing off the new PET models, John Feagans noticed Bill Gates step up to one of the demo computers. “He was looking over his shoulder,” recalls Seiler. “Gates walked up to our machine and played

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finally cornered it. He explains, “I diagnosed it down to a sample program that [reproduced the bug.]” Surprisingly, the bug originated in code written by Bill Gates himself. “Bill wasn’t that familiar with the 6502 architecture,” says Peddle. Micro-Soft corrected the bug and Commodore released a new version of the

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ROM code, called Upgrade BASIC (later renamed BASIC 2.0). Feagans was still determined to find the Easter egg snuck in by Bill Gates. “It drove Feagans crazy for a while because we couldn’t find the word Microsoft anywhere in the code,” says Seiler. “He had hidden

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there is even a 6502 location in the machine that would be worth looking at.” At the next computer show, Bill Gates would discover he no longer had his fingerprint on Commodore BASIC. * * * Peddle planned to maximize the use of the IEEE-488 interface. “I was trying to build a machine that

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dot matrix printers, allowing text and graphics output, much like inkjet printers. The 2020 printed upper case, lower case, and PETSCII character graphics. Bill Gates in front of the Microsoft booth. Commodore also previewed two other printers behind closed doors at CES, the 4021 and 4022 printers. “I wrote [the ROM code] and

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brought up the 4021 and 4022 in December 1978 and both were shown at the 1979 Winter CES,” says John Feagans. During the show, Bill Gates inspected

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that,” he says. “I made a color video card that plugged into the S-100 that would give it graphics and sound. That was the Altair 8800 bus that eventually got adopted as an industry standard.” While other people his age played video games at the local arcade, Yannes intently studied the

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, the one I built.” Another groupie at Commodore Japan was Kazuhiko Nishi, known to North Americans as Kay Nishi. The engineer was indispensible to Microsoft and Bill Gates in licensing Microsoft BASIC in Japan. “Nishi too was one of the groupies,” says Terakura. “He used to come to the Commodore Japan office to gather information

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Japan and he walked the floors of CES with his father discussing the competition. During one stroll, they ran into their supplier of BASIC. “Jack would often bump into Bill Gates and he would say, ‘You got that so cheaply,’” recalls Spencer. “Jack would say, ‘No we didn’t. If we hadn’

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were, Yannes was learning valuable lessons about sound. After high school, Yannes attended Villanova University. The same year, MITS released the low-cost Altair 8800 microcomputer. “When the first Altair 8800 computer came out back in ’75, a friend of mine got one and that really got me into microcomputers,” he says. Yannes began

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and things which really looked nice in the business world when you did spreadsheets and stuff.” Bill Gates made sure to specify that Microsoft would receive royalties for each copy of the operating system. “Bill Gates learnt from the Commodore BASIC deal, which is probably why he kept the rights to his operating system when he

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shoot the photographs in New York. In the early eighties, most computer companies had a spokesman named Bill. Radio Shack had Bill Bixby and later Bill Gates in a stunning pink-collared shirt and white sweater. Texas Instruments had Bill Cosby. Commodore would also have a Bill. The ad agency made an

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travel to the Microsoft campus and see the luxury where they lived,” recalls Finkel. “There were drink machines on every floor, every office had a door, and every office had two development machines. It was very nice.” When the Commodore employees met with Bill Gates’ team, Hartmann knew it would

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reluctance went back to his earlier dealings with Jack Tramiel. “My theory was Bill Gates always resented the deal he’d made for BASIC with Commodore,” says Finkel. However, Hartmann persevered. “While I was there when they went to Microsoft, I really wasn’t saying much during the meetings except to say whether or

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In 1981, Nishi was working for IBM. The 26 year old witnessed the increasing popularity of home computers and decided to design one. “He and [Bill] Gates formed this team,” recalls Peddle. “They were both about the same age and he moved to Seattle. He’s pushing Gates to design a computer

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry

by Martin Campbell-Kelly · 15 Jan 2003

safely advance to chapter 2. In discussing the monographic literature, one should perhaps begin with the bad news: There are more books written about Microsoft and Bill Gates than about the rest of the industry put together. Most of this literature has been produced by journalists seeking to satisfy the immense curiosity

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about how Bill Gates came to be the richest man in the 24 Chapter 1 world. The result has been a gross distortion of the public perception of the structure of the software industry and Microsoft’s place in it. That Microsoft generates at least half of the

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The older image persisted to a degree, but the turnaround was remarkable. Computer Associates shows the imprint of its founder as much as Microsoft bears the hallmark of Bill Gates or Oracle that of Larry Ellison. Yet, unlike Gates and Ellison, Charles Wang is virtually unknown outside The Corporate Software Products Industry

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Wang tried to articulate a view of computing in Techno Vision, a book aimed primarily at business executives.23 Techno Vision attracted less attention than Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead (published the following year), and it offers few insights into Computer Associates’ strategy. As yet there are no biographies of

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suggested that the Internet would power the already-successful company to ever greater heights.30 Embroiled in the US v. Microsoft anti-trust action, Microsoft had seen its stock price plunge. Now, Bill Gates had a potential rival as the richest man in the world. Although Gates and Ellison are both strongly associated with

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that the personal computer software industry took several years to shake off. The first microprocessor-based computer (or certainly the first influential one) was the Altair 8800, manufactured by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS). This machine was sold in kit form for assembly by computer hobbyists, and its appearance on the

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of Popular Electronics in January 1975 is perhaps the best-known event in the folk history of the personal computer. The cover reads: “Exclusive! Altair 8800. The most powerful minicomputer project ever presented—can be built for under $400.”3 The Altair computer was positioned in the market as a minicomputer

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. Costing one-tenth as much as the cheapest commercially available model, and targeted at the electronics hobbyist, the Altair 8800 was successful in its niche. Several hundred were sold in the 6 months after its introduction. A number of imitators followed, the most important

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IMS soon began to lose market share and eventually went out of business. However, a number of individuals who developed software for these machines—including Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Gary Kildall—were to get a first-mover advantage that would give them early dominance of the personal computer software industry.

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low-cost minicomputer. Programming Languages Microsoft got its start developing the first programming languages for microcomputers.4 The first microprocessor-based computers were so simple that they did not require an operating system, but programmers did need a programming language to develop application programs. Bill Gates and Paul Allen filled this void

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in 1975 by providing a programming language for the MITS Altair 8800. Gates was born in 1955 into a well-to-do and socially accomplished Seattle family. He

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According to Gates and his many biographers, in his sophomore year at Harvard he saw the January 1975 issue of Practical Electronics, which had the Altair 8800 kit on the cover, and saw in a flash the opportunity to The Personal Computer Software Industry 205 become the leading vendor of programming

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languages for microcomputers.6 The Altair 8800 used the Intel 8008 microprocessor, with which Gates and Allen were already familiar. Working mainly at night, Gates and Allen wrote a BASIC compiler for the Altair during the next month. Although a considerable achievement, writing

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their own histories. It is, if you like, a view from the outside looking in.1 Microsoft and the Software Industry One reason for the widespread interest in Microsoft is that its founder and major stockholder, Bill Gates, has become the richest man in the world. Another is that, whereas most computer users

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—but at the time of 232 Chapter 8 writing the Library of Congress lists twenty monographs on Bill Gates and Microsoft. There are more books on Microsoft than on the rest of the software industry.2 Microsoft is often perceived as a latter-day IBM, completely dominating the software industry. This is simply not

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of the new games looming out of the technological fog, to see their shape, to cognize them. Bill Gates is not so much a wizard of technology as a wizard Not Only Microsoft 243 of precognition, of discerning the shape of the next game.”18 It is clear from The Road

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dramatically affected Lotus’s profits, causing its share price to fall nearly 60 percent in 1988. Microsoft’s spreadsheet, eventually to become Lotus 1-2-3’s main competitor, had started life in 1980, when Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided to diversify into applications to reduce their dependence on systems software

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industry since the early 1980s. However, as this book has been at pains to point out, Microsoft still constitutes only about one-tenth of this extremely fragmented industry. Nonetheless, Microsoft’s amazing success demands historical analysis. Was Bill Gates smart, lucky, or ruthless? A little of each, perhaps. Without doubt, Gates has “smarts”

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working on their Not Only Microsoft 265 paper, Shapiro recalled Katz saying there was a guy who had been at Harvard when Katz was an undergraduate, who was doing precisely what they were writing about at a software company outside Seattle. He was speaking of Bill Gates of course.”72 “The foremost

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Source, an organization for supplying business information that could be manipulated by means of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. Gary Kildall and Bill Gates played major roles in establishing a consumer market for CD-ROM media. Kildall was the inventor of the CP/M operating system and the founder

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PF/Checkbook software products but in other related products and services, such as PC-based home banking.48 The case was so strong that Bill Gates pragmatically withdrew Microsoft’s bid to take over Intuit. It is often supposed that a software entrepreneur’s dream is to create a business and grow

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officers of UK systems integrators and large-scale users, and heads of government laboratories. While sales of personal computers were increasing exponentially, and while Bill Gates was making his second billion, the ACARD inquiry ignored the personal computer. And one can almost sense the disdain with which the committee would have

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I. Schwartz, “No More Funny Money for Software Makers,” Business Week, February 18, 1991: 122B, 122G. 45. Janice Maloney, “Larry Ellison Is Captain Ahab and Bill Gates Is Moby Dick,” Fortune, October 28, 1996: 75–78; Richard Brandt, “Can Larry Beat Bill?” Business Week, May 15, 1995: 38–43, 46. 334

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M. Campbell-Kelly and W. Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Basic Books, 1996), p. 240. 4. The details of Microsoft here are mainly from the following: James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (Wiley, 1992); Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How

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) and Stanley J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, Winners, Losers and Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology (Independent Institute, 1999). The two best journalistic accounts are James Wallace and J. Erickson, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (Wiley, 1992) and Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How

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Market, 1984–86, p. 32. 17. This and the foregoing statistics appear in Ichbiah and Knepper, The Making of Microsoft (p. 86ff.). 18. Arthur, “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business.” 19. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (Viking, 1995). Notes to pp. 243–252 339 20. Jim Carlton, Apple: The Inside

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Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience, third edition. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: New Riders, 1989. Wallace, James, and Jim Erickson. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. Wiley, 1992. Wang, An. Lessons: An Autobiography. Addison-Wesley, 1986. Wang, Charles B. Techno Vision. McGraw-Hill, 1994. Second edition,

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words

Kahn complete TCP/IP protocols for the Internet. 1974 Intel 8080 comes out. 1975 Altair personal computer from MITS appears. Paul Allen and Bill Gates write BASIC for Altair, form Microsoft. First meeting of Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launch the Apple I. 1977 The Apple II is released. 1978 First

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friends who shaped America’s cold war policies. My initial plan was to focus on the teams that invented the Internet. But when I interviewed Bill Gates, he convinced me that the simultaneous emergence of the Internet and the personal computer made for a richer tale. I put this book on

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understanding of a defining fact of the computer age: that hardware would become commoditized and that programming would be where the true value resided. Until Bill Gates came along, it was an insight that eluded most of the men.12 Von Neumann was disdainful of the Eckert-Mauchly mercenary approach. “Eckert

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a huge market for general-purpose chips and assured that Intel would remain a driver of the digital age. It was a deal point that Bill Gates and Microsoft would emulate with IBM a decade later. In return for giving Busicom a good price, Noyce insisted that Intel retain the rights to the

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link them to other people so they could collaborate—in other words, networked interactive computers with graphic displays. This was in 1950, five years before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born. Even the very first commercial computers, such as UNIVAC, were not yet publicly available. But Engelbart bought into Bush’

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the star that the spaceship Enterprise was visiting that night, Altair. And so the first real, working personal computer for home consumers was named the Altair 8800.113 “The era of the computer in every home—a favorite topic among science-fiction writers—has arrived!” the lede of the Popular Electronics story

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exclaimed.114 For the first time, a workable and affordable computer was being marketed to the general public. “To my mind,” Bill Gates would later declare, “the Altair is the first thing that deserves to be called a personal computer.”115 The day that issue of Popular Electronics

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a mystified reader. “Steven Dompier has an article about the musical program that he wrote for the Altair in the People’s Computer Company publication,” Bill Gates, a Harvard student on leave writing software for MITS in Albuquerque, wrote in the Altair newsletter. “The article gives a listing of his program

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, and the hacker ethic of sharing information freely, represented by the Homebrew crowd. Paul Allen (1953– ) and Bill Gates (1955– ) in the Lakeside school’s computer room. Gates arrested for speeding, 1977. The Microsoft team, with Gates at bottom left and Allen at bottom right, just before leaving Albuquerque in December 1978

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to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey,

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create one. And we did.” Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, “That was the most important idea that I ever had.”4 BILL GATES The rocking motion that Gates exhibited when reading the Popular Electronics article had been a sign of his intensity since childhood. “As a baby, he

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source code of what was then their only product: “Micro-Soft BASIC: Paul Allen wrote the non-runtime stuff. Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff. Monte Davidoff wrote the math package.” Within a couple of years, the name was simplified to Microsoft. After bunking for a while at the Sundowner Motel on a

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#114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software. Bill Gates General Partner, Micro-Soft The letter was printed in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter and also the Altair user group’s Computer Notes and the

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. The editor of one hobbyist newsletter wrote, “Rumors have been circulating through the hobby computer community that imply that development of the BASIC referred to in Bill Gates’s letter was done on a Harvard University computer provided at least in part with government funds and that there was some question as

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a personal computer designed for hobbyists. The mission of the Homebrew Computer Club was to share ideas freely. That put it in the crosshairs of Bill Gates, but Wozniak embraced the communal ethos: “I so believed in the club’s mission to further computing that I Xeroxed maybe a hundred copies

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woke up the big computer companies, most notably IBM, and prompted an alternative to emerge. IBM—more specifically IBM as it was outmaneuvered by Bill Gates—would embrace an approach in which the personal computer’s hardware and its operating system were made by different companies. As a result, software would

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have to license software from outside vendors rather than have it written in-house. So on July 21, 1980, he placed a call to Bill Gates and asked to see him right away. When Gates invited him to fly to Seattle the following week, Sams replied that he was already heading

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company up in Seattle run by a guy named Bill Gates.” To which Opel responded, “Oh, you mean Mary Gates’s son? Oh, yeah, she’s great.”102 Producing all the software for IBM was a struggle, as Gates predicted, but the ragtag Microsoft crew worked around the clock for nine months

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the users of all three of their services into one integrated online service with a brand name all its own. The software approach pioneered by Bill Gates would apply to the online realm as well: online services would be unbundled from the hardware and would work on all computer platforms. Now

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Bina. “We can run with this and really make it work.”37 For two months they engaged in a programming binge that rivaled those of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. For three or four days straight they would code around the clock—Andreessen fueled by milk and cookies, Bina by Skittles

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of the human brain? “Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system,” Bill Gates speculates. “It’s like reverse-engineering someone else’s product in order to solve a challenge.”14 That won’t be easy. It took

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based on a sharp vision of where semiconductor technology was heading, and they both were collegial and nonauthoritarian to a fault. Even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, with all of their prickly intensity, knew how to build strong teams around them and inspire loyalty. Brilliant individuals who could not collaborate tended

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Larry Brilliant, John Seeley Brown, Nolan Bushnell, Jean Case, Steve Case, Vint Cerf, Wes Clark, Steve Crocker, Lee Felsenstein, Bob Frankston, Bob Kahn, Alan Kay, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Andy Grove, Justin Hall, Bill Joy, Jim Kimsey, Leonard Kleinrock, Tracy Licklider, Liza Loop, David McQueeney, Gordon Moore, John Negroponte, Larry Page, Howard

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deli/solomons_memory.php; Levy, Hackers, 189 and passim; Mims, “The Altair Story.” 114. H. Edward Roberts and William Yates, “Altair 8800 Minicomputer,” Popular Electronics, Jan. 1975. 115. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 116. Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, “Crystal Fire,” IEEE SCS News, Spring 2007, adapted from Crystal Fire (Norton, 1977). 117

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time I spent with him, his father, and colleagues for a Time cover story I wrote, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates,” Time, Jan. 13, 1997; emails from Bill Gates Sr.; Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates (Doubleday, 1993, locations refer to Kindle edition); James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Hard Drive (Wiley,

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, 38. 3. Allen, Idea Man, 1069. 4. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. See also Bill Gates oral history, Ford Innovation Series. 5. Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.” 6. Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.” 7. Author’s interview with Bill Gates Sr. 8. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 715. 9. Author’s interview with

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26. 18. Allen, Idea Man, 751. 19. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.” 20. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. (Also in other oral histories.) 21. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 924. 22. Author’s interviews with Bill Gates and Bill Gates Sr. 23. Author’s interview with Steve Russell. 24. Wallace and

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Idea Man, 719. 30. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 42. 31. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.” 32. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Bill Gates oral history with Larry Cohen and Brent Schlender, provided to me by Bill Gates. 33. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 43. 34. Author’s interviews with

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and corrections made by Gates and others on it. 46. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 47. Nicholas Josefowitz, “College Friends Remember Bill Gates,” Harvard Crimson, June 4, 2002. 48. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 1564. 49. “Bill Gates to Sign Off at Microsoft,” AFP, June 28, 2008. 50. William H. Gates and Christos P. Papadimitriou, “Bounds

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4, 2008. 51. Allen, Idea Man, 62. 52. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 53. Allen, Idea Man, 1058. 54. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 55. Bill Gates and Paul Allen to Ed Roberts, Jan. 2, 1975; Manes

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and Andrews, Gates, 1810. 56. Allen, Idea Man, 160. 57. Allen, Idea Man, 1103. 58. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 1874. 59. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Allen, Idea Man, 1117. 60. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 76. 61. Allen, Idea Man, 1163. 62. Allen, Idea Man, 1204. 63. Allen, Idea

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Man, 1223; Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 81. 64. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 65. Remarks of Bill Gates, Harvard Gazette, June 7, 2007. 66. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 67. The section on Gates in Albuquerque draws on Allen, Idea Man, 1214 and passim; Manes and Andrews, Gates

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, 2008. 77. Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, Feb. 3, 1976, http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/gatesletter.html. 78. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 79. Harold Singer, “Open Letter to Ed Roberts,” Micro-8 Computer User Group newsletter, Mar. 28, 1976. 80. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.

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“Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996. See also James Chposky and Ted Leonsis, Blue Magic (Facts on File, 1988), chapter 9. 92. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995. 93. Steve Ballmer interview, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996.

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. Jack Sams interview, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996. See also Steve Hamm and Jay Greene, “The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates,” Business Week, Oct. 24, 2004. 95. Tim Paterson and Paul Allen interviews, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996. 96. Steve Ballmer

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and Paul Allen interviews, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996; Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3798. 97. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995; Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3868. 98. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3886, 3892. 99.

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Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 100. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995. 101. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 102. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 103. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995. 104

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. Bill Gates interview by David Rubenstein, Harvard, Sept. 21, 2013, author’s notes. 105. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2

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com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY. 111. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 173. 112. Author’s interview with Andy Hertzfeld. 113. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 114. Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley (O’Reilly Media, 2005), 191. See also Andy Hertzfeld, http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_

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Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt. 115. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 116. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs. 117. In addition to the sources cited below, this section is based on my interview with Richard

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Instinct (Harper, 1994), 191. 13. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Prentice Hall, 1995), 566. 14. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 15. Nicholas Wade, “In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain,” New York Times, June 20, 2011; “The Connectome of a Decision-Making Neural Network

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History Museum Popular Electronics cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum Allen and Gates: Bruce Burgess, courtesy of Lakeside School, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Fredrica Rice Gates: Wikimedia Commons/Albuquerque, NM police department Microsoft team: Courtesy of the Microsoft Archives Jobs and Wozniak: © DB Apple/dpa/Corbis Jobs screenshot: YouTube Stallman: Sam Ogden Torvalds: © Jim

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the Computer History Museum Cerf and Kahn: © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis Popular Mechanics cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum Gates and Allen: Bruce Burgess, courtesy of Lakeside School, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Fredrica Rice Apple I: Ed Uthman Apple II: © Mark Richards/CHM IBM PC: IBM/Science Source Gates with Windows disc: © Deborah

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of, ref1, ref2 “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (Brautigan), ref1, ref2 ALOHAnet, ref1 Alpert, Dick, ref1 Altair, ref1, ref2, ref3 Altair 8800, ref1, ref2, ref3 BASIC program for, ref1, ref2, ref3 exhibition of, ref1 AltaVista, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, ref1 American Physical Society, ref1

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Byte Shop’s owner Paul Terrell, who had launched the Apple I by ordering the first fifty for his store. 46. The one written by Bill Gates. 47. Gates donated to computer buildings at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. The one at Harvard, cofunded with Steve Ballmer, was named Maxwell

The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World

by James Ashton · 11 May 2023 · 401pp · 113,586 words

where enthusiasts shared ideas about the latest electronics. At the first Homebrew meeting, in a garage in Menlo Park, California, Wozniak enthused over the new Altair 8800 computer and took home a sheet listing the technical specifications for the 8008 microprocessor, inspired to build his own free-standing computer. Altair used Intel

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one of several people ‘pulling together to help Apple get healthy again’.4 The most surprising addition to that group of supporters was Bill Gates, the chief executive of Microsoft with whom Apple had been battling for years over patent infringements. The pair had not only resolved their legal differences, but Apple would

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chips there was an operating system called MS-DOS, acquired and adapted in a hurry by Microsoft, at the time a firm with just a few dozen employees led by a geeky 24-year-old, Bill Gates. It was a notable shift in product. IBM had enjoyed great success during the 1970s selling

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catalyst of IBM had faded. Better still, PCs gained fresh impetus when the internet came along. It wasn’t always a cordial relationship. Microsoft’s chief executive Bill Gates and Andy Grove clashed over Intel’s ambition to drive deeper into software. Gates wrote to Grove at one stage, saying that ‘when Intel

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invested in Japanese media alongside Rupert Murdoch and bought the US computer trade show Comdex from Las Vegas gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson. Together with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, he implored the South Korean President Kim Dae-jung to throw all his resources into broadband investment to rebuild the nation’s economy. Looking

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil · 25 Jun 2024

1970s, with machines such as the Kenbak-1, and in 1975 the wildly popular Altair 8800, which was sold in build-it-yourself kits.[92] By the end of the decade companies like Apple and Microsoft were transforming the market with user-friendly personal computers that ordinary people could learn to

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.081 1962 DEC PDP-4 ~ 0.097 1965 DEC PDP-8 ~ 1.8 1969 Data General Nova ~ 2.5 1973 Intellec 8 ~ 4.9 1975 Altair 8800 ~ 144 1984 Apple Macintosh ~ 221 1986 Compaq Deskpro 386 (16 MHz) ~ 224 1987 PC’s Limited 386 (16 MHz) ~ 330 1988 Compaq Deskpro

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TO NOTE REFERENCE 91 For more on the transformative impact of the Altair 8800, see Jason Fitzpatrick, “The Computer That Changed Everything (Altair 8800),” Computerphile, YouTube video, May 15, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwEmnfy2BhI; “The PC That Started Microsoft & Apple! (Altair 8800),” ColdFusion, YouTube video, March 18, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch

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-sheets/detail/diarrhoeal-disease. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 243 For more on these technologies, including an amusing video of Bill Gates and Jimmy Fallon drinking water extracted from raw sewage by the Janicki Omni Processor, see Bill Gates, “Janicki Omniprocessor,” GatesNotes, YouTube video, January 5, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVzppWSIFU0