i was reading about the the original homebrew computer club from the 70sin an article and it mentioned the altair iit also said microsoft made the first version of basic and a lunar lander game for it…but did anything actually useful get created for it? i mean history says the apple 1 blew it out of the water pretty easily …
There was a Microsoft-made COBOL compiler available for the 8080; a copy of the manual can be found on the website (pdf) of a hobbyist project that offers 8080 emulations. Since COBOL was widely used in the business and finance world*, I suppose there were such applications running on 8080s.
*) And, from what I’ve heard, still is to a larger extent than people think it is; I’ve heard claims that most credit card payments will, at some stage of their way from payer to payee, be processed by some software written in COBOL.
wow . funny thing according to the article The MS habit of "sell the OS first and then make it "fist appeared in the 8088 also …a tactic that would benefit them greatly if the story on how they conned IBM into buying ms-dos is true…
It wasn’t really the first PC, just the first one that was affordable to the hobbyist. But it was really more of a toy. The first computer recognizable as a modern PC actually predated the Altair 8800, and it was a real PC, with a windows-based GUI, mouse, HDD, Ethernet LAN, word processing with output to a LAN-attached laser printer, and many other things we take for granted today. That computer was the Xerox Alto, developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and first released in 1973, a year before the Altair.
In a simpler time BASIC was ‘actually useful’ and people did actual useful things with it. But spreadsheets were the ‘killer app’: in that sense, nothing actually useful was created for any micro computer until VisiCalc on the Apple II.
You can run stuff like CPM and SuperCalc on an Altair computer, but they weren’t ‘created for it’, they didn’t get created until further down the line, and run on lots of different computers.
There were eventually hundreds of Altair-compatible bus cards that turned Altair-bus computers into useful instruments, but the first Altair by itself was just a project for people to experiment with: until people developed support for printers and keyboards and floppy disks, you had to toggle instructions in using the front panel.
I can 100% guarantee this is false. IBM licensed DOS, they didn’t buy it, and Gary went flying. And MS bought DOS from a guy named Tim Patterson who made tens of millions off his MS stock and freely admits he could not have done with DOS what Gates did with it.
The Altair defined the S-100 bus which helped fuel the PC revolution outside of Apple. Numerous PCs were made using this standard bus architecture, it allowed the use of 3rd party boards in computers from memory and I/O. Apple ][ computers were more suited to the emerging non-technical PC user but the commercial use of PCs depended heavily on S-100 bus compatible accessories available across a number of computer makes. Even machines which did not follow this standard often benefited from copying the numerous designs made for it.
BTW: Very few of the Apple 1 computers were made and sold before the switch to the Apple ][. The Apple 1 didn’t blow anything out of the water.
This is what the Apple 1 looked like (below); it was literally a hand-built motherboard (by Steve Wozniak in a garage) in a user-provided wooden box with no external storage (a later expansion card allowed for cassette tape storage). It was revolutionary in the nascent homebrew programming community because you didn’t have to be an experienced electronics hobbyist to put it together, but it wasn’t as if it made computing accessible to non-enthusiasts. The Apple ][, on the other hand, got into high rate production and could be found in classrooms and homes throughout the 'Eighties, where it quickly replaced the Commodore PET and early TRS-80 as the educational computer of choice.
Stranger
To expand on this for a bit, here is the story I have long heard and never seriously refuted, MS started out as a company that programmed BASIC on various computers, notably for the Apple ][ and for CP/M systems. CP/M (control program/microcomputer) was an early operating system that had been created by Gary Kildall for early microcomputers.
IBM came calling on MS to buy a BASIC interpreter for their micro under development. Gates agreed but when they asked him about OSs, Gates first sent them to see Kildall. At this point, things got a bit murky. Gary was out flying; his wife refused to sign an NDA; whatever. At any rate, they came back to Gates, who agree to whip something up.
Meantime, Tim Patterson of a company called Seattle computer that was primarily involved in building peripheral hardware built something he called QDOS (quick and dirty operating system) in order to work on the hardware. Gates then licensed QDOS and modified it produce the very first version of MS-DOS. MS then licensed this to IBM (why IBM didn’t insist on buying it is a mystery to me, but the whole industry would have been entirely different if they had). Eventually, MS bought the rights to QDOS from Seattle Computing and also hired Tim Patterson.
Two other decisions by IBM led to the clones and the eventual exit of IBM from making PCs: using a standard off-the-shelf wiring architecture (bus) and publishing the BIOS (basic input/output system) that allowed communication with peripherals.
that’s the story I was referring too although I missed the fact the guy that made dos wasn’t an ms employee via the "triumph of the nerds " documentary that was made in the late 90s … supposedly the qdos demo IBM saw was a reskinned CP/M … and the real program didn’t get made for 6 months
Microsoft was an early innovator in vaporware, really one of the giants in that field, like if John Romero hooked up with that Battlecruiser 3000 AD guy and they both went on a meth bender.
I mean, shit, their first program for the Altair was finished on the plane flight to demonstrate the damn thing, lol.
I enjoyed “Triumph of the Nerds” too (and the related book “Accidental Empires”)
Gates created his version of BASIC to use on the Altair 8800. The customer failed to specify their ownership rights in the contract and Gates formed Microsoft and sold it to other computer producers, but not Apple.
CP/M was created separately by Kildall. IBM wanted to buy BASIC from Microsoft but Microsoft did not have an operating system. It’s unclear what happened in early contacts but if Gates offered to develop an OS for IBM, they declined.
Then the famous brush-off by Kildall. He was riding high and mighty from CP/M sales and expected he could get whatever he wanted from IBM. He was wrong. By the time IBM got back to Microsoft Bill Gates did have an operating system. He had purchased it from another company for what turned out to be a very low price. IBM didn’t really care about the details, they had an OS now and the belief that they were going to make trillions by selling all the PCs in the world. Surely customers would not buy a PC from other companies.
Gates came from a connected family - his mother was head of the United Way, iirc, where she met IBM’s Chairman, John Opel. She pitched Opel her son’s business, he promised to give them a shot, and here I am, typing this on Android.
Well, Gates didn’t get everything. 
(I love how we’re all telling each other stuff we all know.)
How?
From Wikipedia:
JohnT
(I love how we’re all telling each other stuff we all know.)
It’s a charity for the folks in the cheap seats. It’s a night like that, where I plug weird Tandy crap, like a book i have with subprograms which if used together, could run a small business in 1978 from a Model III. Despite its Z80.
I meant on a more basic level: how did he finish the program while on the plane? On punch cards, or what?
I’m sure on paper. Nothing else would have been any use to them. They would have entered the code through the front panel of the computer to read a paper tape, possibly through an ASR 33 Teletype machine or something similar . A bootstrap program in this case means the code used to read more code from some I/O device on a computer that has no other code in memory.