Laura Rich The Accidental Zillionaire, Dem

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.The article also said that the makers of the Altair, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Albuquerque, were looking for a computer language for the Altair.26THE ACCIDENTAL ZILLIONAIRE“Well, here’s our opportunity to do something with BASIC,”said Allen to Gates.They’d cut their teeth on BASIC and believed it was the best, most efficient language for a simple computer.Those Intel chips still weren’t anywhere near as powerful as what was driving the mainframes of the day, so to Allen and Gates, BASIC seemed to be about the right size.It made sense to them to work on rigging it for this new machine.The article had even suggested BASIC would be the right one.Gates was just as excited as Allen, but it took them a few days before they did anything about it.Then, they decided to go ahead and tell MITS they had a BASIC that was ready to go.It was Gates’s idea that they might as well get themselves some business before they got going.They sent a letter to MITS in Albuquerque.MITS’ president, Ed Roberts, got the letter, but it was on Traf-O-Data letterhead, which still listed Paul Gilbert’s parents’ home as the return address and phone number.Roberts was ready to do a deal, but when he tried the number and didn’t find anyone who knew anything about Traf-O-Data, he gave up on them.Fortunately, Allen and Gates placed a follow-up call.By then, 50 people had called up to say they had a version of BASIC for his Altair.“I told them, ‘The first one that showed up with a working BASIC would get the deal,’ ” says Roberts.But there was also a delay at MITS.The company was still working out kinks in the computer’s memory.If Allen and Gates wanted to come out, they should come, he told them, but they would have to wait a month until the Altair was ready for their BASIC.With that promise in hand, Allen and Gates got down to business.What was so exciting about the Altair wasn’t that it was the first minicomputer.Digital Equipment Corporation hadMAKING MICROSOFT27been selling minicomputers.A small computer called the Mark 8was also on the market.And Xerox’s esteemed research lab, Palo Alto Research Center, had developed its own minicomputer called the Alto.But the Altair was affordable and available.It brought the idea of owning a computer closer to the mainstream.Once it was there, however, it didn’t do much.The Altair’s front was a mess of switches and lights that could be made to do little more than blink.Most people wouldn’t know what to do with the machine, but hobbyists took to it instantly.One hobbyist figured out that the Altair emitted radio signals.He put a radio next to it, set it on an empty frequency and, after flicking a series of switches, made the Altair send a song through the radio.From hobbyists like him, MITS was taking up to 50 orders for Altairs each day.“We were increasing the world’s supply of computers by 1 percent every month,” says Roberts.Allen and Gates had picked the right company to do business with—MITS seemed to be soaring.MITS didn’t start out with computer ambitions.When Roberts, a hefty World War II vet with a booming voice, retired from the air force in the 1950s, he started the company to sell toy rockets.In the 1960s, the company moved into the trendy calculator market, but that failed to make Roberts rich.In 1973, the banks had come calling for the money they’d continued to loan him.That’s when Roberts sold them on the idea of a minicomputer for hobbyists to stave them off.The Altair was designed by Roberts and his air force buddy William Yates.What customers ended up getting was a kit that included the nuts and bolts of a computer—literally.For things like extra memory, or even one of those Intel chips, customers had to go elsewhere.Still, it made the beginnings of a personal computer widely available.Roberts saw the possibilities for his new machine—he was as much of a technology dreamer as Allen.In the future, he believed, computers would let people buy movie tickets, book travel, and buy goods and services.28THE ACCIDENTAL ZILLIONAIREFor all of Roberts’ dreams, the Altair in its present state wasn’t likely to be the machine that did all that.For now, it needed something to make it do more than blink—something like BASIC.This language could be the basis for writing software programs around Roberts’s plans for the machine.But no one at MITS had software expertise.They needed Allen and Gates, badly.Once they got started on building BASIC for the Altair, Allen and Gates were very secretive.They told few people of their plans, and when, over a meal in Gates’s dorm cafeteria, they asked another Harvard student, Monte Davidoff, to help them out, Allen and Gates told him little until they could meet in private.Their instincts told them that they were onto something big and didn’t have much time to do it.They’d been surprised by the appearance of the Altair, but they were desperate not to be beaten by someone else with a version of BASIC for the Altair.It seemed more likely that other people—like the hordes of hobbyists in Silicon Valley—would be the ones to deliver BASIC.These two didn’t think that way [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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