Altair BASIC, every mention

Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired Apr 22, 2024 · 20 mentions

• ▶ 41:59 David Rosenthal And Bill and Paul, they get him on the phone, and they say, we have a basic interpreter ready to go, ready to ship for the AT-AT Intel chip, and we want to provide it for you for your machine.
• ▶ 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…
• ▶ 43:07 Ben Gilbert The hardware is powerful, but they're not going to have a lot of customers unless there's stuff you can do on the machine and a basic interpreter running on it.
• ▶ 44:40 David Rosenthal Yep, Bill writes the basic interpreter, and in a couple weeks, they've got it working.
• ▶ 45:08 David Rosenthal So Paul gets on a plane, flies from Boston to Albuquerque, and, you know, in a total, like, epic legend moment, they didn't have a bootloader written for the basic interpreter.
• ▶ 45:21 David Rosenthal So they had the basic, it was all written, they'd done it on the emulator, and Paul's flying out with the tape, the computer tape, with the code of the basic interpreter on it.
• ▶ 45:40 Ben Gilbert On paper, by hand, he is hand-coding octal, not even assembly language instructions, like he's hand-coding in pure octal the instructions to load their basic interpreter program into memory.
• ▶ 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,
• ▶ 46:38 David Rosenthal Paul's like, oh my god, the basic works.
• ▶ 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.
• ▶ 54:45 David Rosenthal So MITS gets exclusive license to the BASIC interpreter, to the BASIC, as they call it, for the AD-AD.
• ▶ 54:55 David Rosenthal And MITS is the one that can then decide whether to sub-license the BASIC out to other companies or not.
• ▶ 55:06 David Rosenthal Distribution deal with MITS where MITS becomes the exclusive seller and distributor of Microsoft's BASIC.
• ▶ 55:23 David Rosenthal And the terms of the deal are Microsoft is to get 30 dollars for each copy of BASIC that MITS sells, plus 50% of the revenue that comes from
• ▶ 55:33 David Rosenthal These sub-licensing deals that MITS may or may not do with other companies who want to use the BASIC.
• ▶ 55:59 David Rosenthal Amount of lifetime revenue that Microsoft can make from the Basic.
• ▶ 57:04 David Rosenthal And commercialize the basic broadly in the marketplace, and that any failure to do so by MITS would be grounds for termination of the contract by Microsoft.
• ▶ 58:26 David Rosenthal Despite MITS selling thousands of computers a month, only a few hundred copies of BASIC are selling per month.
• ▶ 1:03:11 David Rosenthal MITS has to sell and customers have to make the decision to buy our BASIC is a key critical part of the value of the computer.