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

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.