represents 28 or 256 possible values) (Kidwell and Ceruzzi 95). There was no form of permanent storage. This meant that any time you turned off the Altair everything you had done would be lost. Programs had to be entered through the switches on the front panel, in machine language (the primitive language of the processor), and in binary (ones and zeros). To enter each instruction one had to set eight switches, and then flip a ninth to load the instruction. This hassle didnt turn out to be an incredible problem, though, because the Altair only had 256 bytes of memory. Since each instruction was one byte long, it could only store 256 instructions, or pieces of data, at one time. This is a very small amount. So the question arose, what could you actually do with this thing? (Triumph)The first people that actually came up with a use for the Altair were Bill Gates and Paul Allen. When they saw the ad on the front of Popular Electronics magazine for the Altair they knew instantly that they had found their calling (Shurkin 309). Almost immediately they called up Ed Roberts and told him that they had a version of BASIC for his computer. Roberts had been getting many offers, so he told them what he was telling all the other software developers, if they could show it to him he would sell it. So Gates and Allen worked for the next six weeks on a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and when they finally showed it to Roberts it worked. Although all it did was simply announce it presence, it was functioning and Roberts agreed instantly to sell it (Campbell-Kelley and Aspray 241-242). By this time Gates and Allen had formed a company they called Micro-Soft (later to be changed to Microsoft). They decided that instead of selling the product to Roberts they would lease it to him. BASIC was what the Altair needed, and it led to a whole series of software and expansion cards for the Altair (Campbell-Kelley and Aspray 241-242; Shurkin 309).One of the produc...
