Skip to main content
My wanderings today took me back to the beginning of the personal computer revolution: the MITS Altair kit computer.

Click here for a look at Altair Basic. This was Bill and Paul's first BASIC language product at a time when Microsoft Corporation was called Micro-Soft.

Check out the scans of the original manual as well as Bill Gate's complaint about hobbyist piracy in a 1976 issue of Radio Electronics. Some things change and some things remain the same.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BASIC turns 50

Well, the BASIC language actually turned 50 on May 1, 2014, and I'm very late to the party. Born at Dartmouth in 1964 (along with the first commercial time sharing), here is the university's tribute page . There is even a great 38 minute documentary that they made for the occasion. 10 PRINT "ENJOY" 20 GOTO 10
Post a Comment
Read more

Tiny Basic tinkering

One of the examples on the Run Basic website is a port of Tiny Basic . It's fun to play with and is very much like the interactive, command line Basics found on early personal computers. In fact, I think Tiny Basic was the dialect used on the TRS-80 Model 1. I'm currently working on modifying Tiny Basic to run the Sieve benchmark. Tiny Basic needs two things: profiling and array support . I've already added profiling support for the RUN command. Tiny Basic now displays the running time of a program in milliseconds. The last step is to add array support. Tiny Basic only supports the numeric variables 'a' to 'z'. I'm adding a single array to the environment in order to port the Sieve program. The array will be called a(). I will post the modified Tiny Basic code to the Run Basic Programming Wiki when finished. The whole point of this exercise, however, is to see how fast the Tiny Basic interpreter runs the Sieve benchmark and compare it to the others i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Run BASIC Hosting Service Launched

The new Run BASIC hosting service launched at midnight! Please visit http://runbasichosting.com for more details. Monthly and annual subscriptions are available. Run BASIC , a product by ShopTalk Systems, is a tool that makes it easy to create your own web applications. No computer science degree required . Run BASIC Hosting is a service that makes it easy to deploy your applications to the Internet. No IT experience required .
Post a Comment
Read more