MITS

“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. So they had the basic, it was all written, they'd done it on the emulator, and Paul's …”

“The list price from Intel for the 8080 chip was 360 dollars... He managed to negotiate a volume deal with Intel to get eighty-eighty chips at 75 bucks a pop.”

“And that clause is that MITS must use its best efforts to license, promote, 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.”

“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 These sub-licensing deals that MITS may or may not do with other companies who want to use the BASIC.”

“Despite MITS selling thousands of computers a month, only a few hundred copies of BASIC are selling per month.”

“After the Popular Electronics article comes out, they get 4000 pre-orders in the first month or two, which is one and a half million dollars in Revenue. Cash paid up front.”

“And the kicker on this contract is that the total Amount of lifetime revenue that Microsoft can make from the Basic. From MITS is capped at a 180,000 dollars.”

“So in May of 1977, MITS gets acquired by the tape drive manufacturer Pertek for six and a half million dollars”