Bill Gates recalls that, when he and Paul Allen read about the Altair in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, they understood that the price of computers would soon drop to the point that selling software for them would be a profitable business.

citation

Wikipedia contributors. (2023, December 28). Altair BASIC. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 11, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Altair_BASIC&oldid=1192303187

It is the perfection of God’s works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion. And therefore as they would understand the frame of the world must endeavor to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity, so must it be in seeking to understand these visions. Isaac Newton

Altair BASIC (Wikipedia) Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft’s first product (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASIC was the start of the Microsoft BASIC product range.