Altair 8800, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 18Ben Gilbert 3Steve Ballmer 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Altair 8800 comes up
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 35:53 Steve Ballmer And when the Altair came out, the first real sort of microprocessor based computer, Paul says, okay, let's write all the software that these things will ever need.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 37:48 David Rosenthal On whose cover is the Altair, 8800.
- ▶ 41:47 David Rosenthal They call up the main phone number of Altair's manufacturer, a company called MITS, M-I-T-S, and ask for the president, a man named Ed Roberts.
- ▶ 42:30 David Rosenthal What I'm telling them, and I'm going to tell you too, is that anybody who can come here to my office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and demonstrate a working version of Basic on my Altair will get a contract with us to distribute it when they…
- ▶ 43:24 David Rosenthal I was gonna talk about this in a minute, but let's talk about what the Altair is.
- ▶ 43:31 David Rosenthal This is, the Altair is the first mass market commercially available personal computer.
- ▶ 45:58 David Rosenthal So, he lands in Albuquerque, drives out to MITS, they load the bootloader onto the prototype Altair there that loads up the basic interpreter,
- ▶ 46:41 David Rosenthal And Ed's like, oh my god, the Altair works.
- ▶ 47:45 David Rosenthal And the reason that they're introducing the Altair and they made this big splash in the magazine was this is a last ditch gambit to try and save the company.
- ▶ 51:40 Ben Gilbert Yeah, software department of one, but you know, he's got his buddy Bill Gates, who is not employed, but Bill's definitely working on software for the Altair as well.
- ▶ 51:48 David Rosenthal So Bill stays at Harvard, but keeps cranking on enhancing the basic interpreter and adding more functions and functionality to the version of basic that they had just written for the Altair.
- ▶ 52:05 David Rosenthal Now the Altair is getting ready to ship with the basic, the Microsoft basic included in it.
- ▶ 57:23 David Rosenthal So the Altair comes out for sale later in 1975.
- ▶ 57:27 David Rosenthal Microsoft does 16,000 dollars in revenue that year from their 30 dollars a pop, uh, the basics that are getting sold with the Altair, which is great, especially the first year that they're starting.
- ▶ 57:41 David Rosenthal And the next year in 1976, everybody's so excited about this new market, the vision that's happening, the demand, the Altair, the sales that Paul Allen
- ▶ 1:04:24 David Rosenthal Like, the Altair and MITS was the microcomputer company.
- ▶ 1:04:56 David Rosenthal All three of which machines were, like the Altair, low cost, mass market.
- ▶ 1:05:03 David Rosenthal Unlike the Altair, they were not kits.
- ▶ 1:25:54 David Rosenthal So all the early microcomputers we were just talking about, you know, the Altair, the Apple II, the TRS-eighty, these are all eight-bit machines.
- ▶ 1:27:36 Ben Gilbert Which is why they only cost 375 bucks or whatever for an Altair.
- ▶ 1:52:40 David Rosenthal And what Bill saw was he really made a bet that the same dynamics that played out with the Altair were also gonna play out with the IBM PC.
- ▶ 1:53:35 Ben Gilbert Very modest experience watching the Altair and all these sort of Altair clone type machines, or even if they're not Altair clones, just more microcomputers that need more software.