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ZDNET's key takeaways
Microsoft open-sourced the MS-BASIC language.
Bill Gates would never have seen this coming back in the day.
MS-BASIC 1.1 was many developers' first language.
If, like my ZDNET colleague David Gerwitz and I, you were tinkering with computers in 1975, you badly wanted an MITS Altair 8080 computer, the first PC. To build software on it, most of us used Altair BASIC. A pair of college dropouts named Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the language. Then they formed a company, Micro-Soft, to sell it. You know that company better as Microsoft.
Also: Microsoft at 50: Its incredible rise, 15 lost years, and stunning comeback - in 4 charts
In 1976, they rebranded Altair BASIC to Microsoft BASIC 1.1 and ported it from the 8080 processor to the MOS 6502 microprocessor. Gates had always intended this BASIC to run on more than just the Altair PCs. As he said in a Smithsonian interview, "MITS was only one company, and we wanted our software to be used on all the machines." It was a great move. MS-BASIC became a wildfire success.
That's because it was the first high-level language for many of the early PCs, such as the Apple II, Commodore PET, VIC-20, and one of the first important gaming platforms, the Nintendo Entertainment System.
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