Software
The History of Microsoft: 1975, BASIC, and Altair
Channel 9 is beginning a new series, going back in time and taking a look at the history of Microsoft. The first episode goes all the way back to 1975 and takes a look at BASIC, and the inside story of Bill Gates and Paul Allen getting it to run on an Altair.
Gavin Miller
02/06/2009 at 12:42 pm
We’ve come a long way haven’t we? What was your first computer Rob?
Rob Bushway
02/06/2009 at 12:43 pm
it was a radioshack 286
GoodThings2Life
02/06/2009 at 5:33 pm
386DX-40 with math coprocessor, 4MB of RAM, and a whopping 120MB hard drive, 1X CD-ROM drive, and Sound Blaster card… crashed Windows 3.0 the first night I had it playing around with video drivers and spent the evening figuring out how to fix it from the command-line setup… since then my repair times for nearly all issues is more like Domino’s Pizza… fixed in 30 minutes or less, lol.
David Howard
02/08/2009 at 1:01 pm
Thanks for sharing this! I read a book by Stephen Manes years ago on Microsoft that had a lot of the same info, but it was cool to actually see and hear all of this. As I recall from the book, Paul Allen was alarmed suddenly while on the plane that they had no way to load the program, that is when he wrote the bootstrap loader. I wonder if they will discuss how Allen and Gates used to use the computers at Harvard with emulation software to write for other platforms.
My first PC was a Commodore Vic 20 around 1981, maybe 82. My first Microsoft DOS based PC was a Tandy 1000.