Microsoft BASIC, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft BASIC comes up
Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:35:07 David Rosenthal Bill and Paul got a cold call from Kei Nishi, who was a guy in Japan who had somehow gotten a hold of the basic interpreter, loved it, and said, I'm so passionate about this, I want to bring it to Japan.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:05:50 David Rosenthal I want to license Microsoft Your Basic for the AD-AD microprocessor here so that we can experiment with these things.
- ▶ 1:06:30 David Rosenthal Is MITS using its best efforts to commercialize the basic and gain adoption in the market?
- ▶ 1:08:49 David Rosenthal The basic.
- ▶ 1:09:00 David Rosenthal Microsoft ends up winning the arbitration, I believe in maybe like November, 1977, meaning they are now totally free to go license basic to anybody who wants to buy it on any terms that they want.
- ▶ 1:09:53 David Rosenthal So Jobs has to go license Microsoft's basic.
- ▶ 1:10:12 David Rosenthal So, Bill and Paul and Microsoft, they do all these deals, and they do them all as cash up front, fixed cost, all you companies, you're gonna pay us, and then you include the basic in the machines that you're selling, and we're gonna get…
- ▶ 1:10:40 David Rosenthal Of access for Apple, for the Apple II to Microsoft's BASIC.
- ▶ 1:10:45 David Rosenthal They're not price gouging here, because Bill sees, he's like, the play here is we want to make it a no-brainer for everybody, everybody who's selling a microcomputer to have Microsoft's BASIC on it, because we want to set the standard.
- ▶ 1:11:10 David Rosenthal They're used to the Microsoft version of BASIC.
- ▶ 1:11:23 David Rosenthal And then once people start trading and then ultimately developing and selling software that they've written, it's only gonna run on our BASIC interpreter, not anybody else's.
- ▶ 1:11:37 Ben Gilbert And one correction there, you don't know for a fact it's only gonna run on Microsoft's Basic Interpreter, but you do know for a fact that it will run on Microsoft's Basic Interpreter, and so if it's cheap enough, why would you take the…
- ▶ 1:11:53 David Rosenthal Basically, his vision is, I wanna remove any oxygen from any argument anyone could have about not using Microsoft's Basic on a microcomputer.
- ▶ 1:13:01 David Rosenthal But when Microsoft sold them the basic, which was already getting established as the standard for 31,000 dollars.
- ▶ 1:13:29 Ben Gilbert A, most of the work was already done for the original basic.
- ▶ 1:16:01 Ben Gilbert The things that people can create now that we've done this basic interpreter and these machines are cheap and plentiful, the magic will take care of itself as long as we ensure
- ▶ 1:17:05 David Rosenthal Bill gets a call from a guy named Kazuhiro Nishi or Kei Nishi, who's a computer enthusiast in Japan, has gotten a hold of Microsoft Basic, totally shares the same vision as Bill and Paul.