Gates and his co-founder, Paul Allen, reached out to the company to pitch an interpreter of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800.

1974: The Altair 8800 microcomputer goes on sale. It doesn't offer much, but it's the small start of a big trend toward small things. At its heart was the Intel 8080 microprocessor, with the ...

Gates and Allen thought that the Altair 8800 was a sign that the “PC revolution was imminent,” as Gates puts it. They decided to create a version of BASIC that can run on the Altair–BASIC ...

4. a drawing entitled: MITS ALTAIR 8800 (/) cpu diagram. It is dated 8-7-76. 5. a blank order form for MITS. 6. A letter from Pam Holloma, Marketing Manager at MITS, dated April, 1976, indicating that ...

Object Details Description This is a homemade keyboard for the Altair 8800 microcomputer. Not long after Intel introduced its 8080 microprocessor, a small firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named MITS ...

Altair Basic was developed by Gates, fellow Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and programmer Monte Davidoff. The trio reportedly coded “day and night for two months” in 1975.

Roberts was a founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), a retailer of electronics kits for hobbyists. There he designed the Altair 8800, arguably the first personal computer.