eavors in starting a software company. In 1974 Intel announced their new chip: the 8080. The two college students sent off letters "to all the big computer companies, offering to write them a version of BASIC for the new Intel chip. We got no takers"(Gates 15).While at Harvard, the cool thing to do was to slack off on classes for most of the semester and try and see how well the student could do at the end. Steve Ballmer and Gates "took a tough graduate- level economics course together- Economics 2010. The professor allowed you to bet your whole grade on the final if you choose"(Gates 40). They did that, did not do anything for the class all semester, and studied and got A's. During one of these slack off periods, Gates and Allen found a very small computer: the Altair 8800 "('Altair' was a destination in a Star Trek episode)"(Gates 16). It had a few switches and lights on the front that you could get to blink, but that was about all. This new chip had great potential, but there was no way to program it. After five weeks of not going to classes, not eating or sleeping regularly, their version of "BASIC was written- and the world's first microcomputer software company was born. In time we named it 'Microsoft'"(Gates 17).Gates left Harvard on leave in 1975. Microsoft's big economic break came in 1980 when "IBM- the computer industry leader- asked Gates to develop an operating system for its new personal computer"(Clayton 452). IBM usually did not use external help in software design or hardware manufacture, but they wanted to release the first personal computer in less than a year. "IBM had elected to build its PC mainly from off-the-shelf components available to anyone. This made a platform that was fundamentally open, which made it easy to copy"(Gates 47). IBM bought the microprocessors from Intel and licensed the operating system from Microsoft. Microsoft bought some work from another company in Seattle and hired its top engineer, Tim ...
