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

The Newsstand That Spawned Microsoft is Set to Close (technologizer.com) Out of Town News, the iconic newsstand smack in the middle of Cambridge, Mass.’s Harvard Square, is within a month of shutting down after 54 years in business. It’s one of the most famous meeting points in the Boston area, since it’s so impossible to miss. But as the Boston Globe reports today, it also played a supporting role in one of the most famous moments in computer history.

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.