@nerdsmoney.and.ma: The Boy Who Wanted More Computer Time Real people. Real events. 1975. There was no Microsoft campus. No Windows. No billion-dollar software company. There wasn’t even a company called Microsoft yet. There were just two young men, a computer magazine, and an idea that wasn’t ready yet. Chapter One — The Magazine January 1975. Bill Gates was 19 years old. His friend Paul Allen was 22. Both had been fascinated by computers for years. They had met as students at Lakeside School in Seattle and spent countless hours programming on machines whenever they could get access to them. Gates later recalled that the two of them had fallen in love with computers while they were students there. Then one day, Allen saw something that grabbed his attention. It was the January issue of Popular Electronics. On the cover was a strange-looking machine called the MITS Altair 8800. It wasn’t an iPhone. It wasn’t a laptop. It didn’t even look particularly friendly. It was essentially a computer kit for hobbyists, sold for hundreds of dollars. The Computer History Museum records the Altair’s appearance on the January 1975 cover as a significant moment in the early personal-computer era. Allen took the magazine to Gates. And the two immediately understood something. Computers were coming. But there was a problem. The Altair was basically useless to an ordinary person without software. And that’s where Gates and Allen saw their opportunity. Chapter Two — The Bluff The boys didn’t own an Altair. They didn’t have a working BASIC interpreter for it. But they contacted Ed Roberts, the founder of MITS, the company behind the Altair. And they told him they had a version of BASIC that could run on the machine. There was just one tiny problem: They didn’t. Bill Gates himself has described this moment: after seeing the Altair, he and Allen told MITS they had BASIC for its processor—and then had to actually create it. Now they had a deadline. And suddenly, this wasn’t just an interesting programming experiment anymore. They had promised something to a real company. So they got to work. Chapter Three — The Code Gates and Allen worked on the BASIC interpreter, using the computer resources available to them. The goal was simple: Make it possible for someone to program the Altair using BASIC. But they didn’t have the luxury of modern development environments. No Visual Studio. No GitHub. No Stack Overflow. No YouTube tutorial saying: “Guys, today we’re going to build an Altair BASIC interpreter in 15 minutes.” They had to figure things out themselves. Allen eventually went to Albuquerque to demonstrate the software to MITS. And the moment of truth arrived. The program worked. MITS agreed to license their BASIC interpreter. Microsoft’s own historical records identify the Altair BASIC deal with MITS in February 1975 as the beginning of the company that would become Microsoft. Think about that for a second. They hadn’t built Windows. They hadn’t built Office. They hadn’t become famous. Their first major product was a programming language interpreter for a tiny computer. Chapter Four — A Company Is Born The business wasn’t even officially called Microsoft at first. In July 1975, Gates used “Micro-soft” in a letter to Allen—the earliest known written reference to the name. And by the end of 1975, the partnership’s sales totaled about $16,005. Sixteen thousand dollars. Today, Microsoft is one of the world’s biggest technology companies. But every giant company has a first invoice. A first customer. A first product. A first night when somebody looked at a problem and thought: “I can build something for this.” For Gates and Allen, that moment came when a magazine landed on a desk. The interesting part The story isn’t really about the Altair. It’s about timing. Gates and Allen recognized that hardware was about to become much more accessibleand that hardware without software would be limited.

NERDS,MONEY AND MACHINES

Open In TikTok:

Region: GH

Monday 28 September 2026 12:53:27 GMT