Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

eaders), you would have a way to write quick, useful programs. While softwarehackers (and certainly such ancient assembly-language zealots as Gosper andGreenblatt) disdained BASIC as a fascist language, to hardware hackers trying toextend their systems it was an incredibly valuable tool.The problem was that at first you couldn't get a BASIC. It was particularlymaddening because MITS supposedly had one, though no one at Homebrew hadseen it run.Indeed, MITS did have a BASIC. It had had the language running since earlyspring 1975. Not long before MITS began shipping Altairs to computer-starvedPopular Electronics readers, Ed Roberts had gotten a phone call from two collegestudents named Paul Alien and Bill Gates.The two teen-agers hailed from Seattle. Since high school the two of them hadbeen hacking computers; large firms paid them to do lucrative contractprogramming. By the time Gates, a slim, blond genius who looked even youngerthan his tender years, had gone off to Harvard, the two had discovered there wassome money to be made in making interpreters for computer languages likeBASIC for new computers.The Altair article, while not impressing them technically, was exciting to them: itwas clear microcomputers were the next big thing, and they could get involved inall the action by writing BASIC for this thing. They had a manual explaining theinstruction set for the 8080 chip, and they had the Popular Electronics article withthe Altair schematics, so they got to work writing something that would fit in 4Kof memory. Actually, they had to write the interpreter in less than that amount ofcode, since the memory would not only be holding their program to interpretBASIC into machine language, but would need space for the program that the userwould be writing. It was not easy, but Gates in particular was a master at bummingcode, and with a lot of squeezing and some innovative use of the elaborate 8080instruction set, they thought they'd done it. When they called Roberts, they did notmention they were placing the call from Bill Gates' college dorm room. Robertswas cordial, but warned them that others were thinking of an Altair BASIC; theywere welcome to try, though. "We'll buy from the first guy who shows up withone," Roberts told them.Not long afterward, Paul Alien was on a plane to Albuquerque with a paper tapecontaining what he and his friend hoped would run BASIC on the machine. Hefound MITS a madhouse. "People would work all day long, rush home, eat theirdinner and come back," MITS executive Eddie Currie later recalled. "You couldgo in there any hour of the day or night and there would be twenty or thirty people,