Tomorrow, April 4, Microsoft Corporation will celebrate its 50th anniversary. To mark the occasion, its founder Bill Gates has released the source code for the Altair BASIC interpreter that defined the company’s origins.
Image source: gatesnotes.com
«Before there was Office, Windows 95, Xbox, or AI, there was Altair BASIC. In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in a vision for a computer on every desk and in every home. Five decades later, Microsoft continues to invent new ways to make life easier and work more productive. Doing this for 50 years is a tremendous accomplishment, and we couldn’t have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella, as well as those who have served at Microsoft over the years,” the Microsoft founder wrote on his blog.
He wrote a lot of code for the company, which contributed to its success in software development and made it one of the most valuable in the world. But he called Altair BASIC “the coolest code I’ve ever written.” The inspiration for the project came from the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine, which featured the Altair 8800 computer on the cover, which inspired Gates to get into software development. He and Allen approached MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the company that made the computer, and proposed a BASIC interpreter for the model.
This product would allow a large number of users to easily create their own programs, but it took Gates and Allen several months to achieve this result. Altair BASIC was the first product that Gates and Allen developed for the new company, then called Micro-Soft, and they got rid of the hyphen later. The source code is 157 pages long and can be downloaded (PDF) and printed.