Bill Gates Goes Nostalgic, Celebrates Microsoft's 50th by Releasing the Altair BASIC Source Code

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is feeling nostalgic, and is looking to celebrate 50 years of the company that made him a billionaire — by publicly releasing the source code for its first commercial product, Altair BASIC.

"In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and every home," Gates recalls of the company known at the time as Micro-Soft. "It feels like just yesterday that Paul and I were hunched over the [Digital] PDP-10 in Harvard's computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company. That code remains the coolest code I've ever written to this day."

Allen and Gates had collaborated previously on a project called the Traf-O-Data, for monitoring traffic flows — but it was not a commercial success. The sight of a MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer on the cover of Popular Electronics, though, turned their fortunes around: Gates and Allen approached MITS founder Ed Roberts with the promise of a programming language that would make the machine more accessible.

It was a white lie: the pair didn't have a language, but they knew of one: BASIC, the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, invented a decade prior at Dartmouth. When Roberts agreed, Allen and Gates set about taking this language and porting it to the Altair 8800 — initially using one of Harvard's PDP-10 machines to emulate the Altair's Intel 8080 processor before Roberts gave them a machine of their own.

Altair BASIC, partly developed by Monte Davidoff, was a success, but not a particular money-spinner; it wouldn't be until Gates' mother arranged a meeting at IBM for Microsoft to promote MS-DOS as the operating system for the upcoming IBM PC that millions and billions would be made — and, like BASIC, MS-DOS wasn't a Microsoft invention but an acquisition from Seattle Computer Products, formerly known as the Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) and the subject of lawsuits alleging it was a knock-off of Gary Kildall's CP/M.

Gates was also not particularly keen on sharing back then: in 1976 he published the infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists," accusing them of sharing Altair BASIC without paying for it. "The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent of [sic] Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware," Gates wrote, "most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?"

Now that the product is most definitely not an ongoing commercial concern, though, Gates' attitude has softened: in a post to his website, Gates has released the full and complete source code for Altair BASIC under an unspecified license — though it's presented as 157 pages of tractor-feed dot-matrix printout, making it quite the type-in exercise.