But there it was: MEMORY SIZE?

“Hey,” said Bill Yates, “it printed something!” It was the first time he or
Ed had seen the Altair do anything beyond a small memory test. They were
flabbergasted. I was dumbfounded. We all gaped at the machine for a few
seconds, and then I typed in the total number of bytes in the seven memory
cards: 7168.

“OK,” the Altair spit back. Getting this far told me that 5 percent of our
BASIC was definitely working, but we weren’t yet home free. The acid test
would be a standard command that we’d used as a midterm exam for our
software back in Cambridge. It relied on Bill’s core coding and Monty’s
floating-point math and even my “crunch” code, which condensed certain
words (like “PRINT”) into a single character. If it worked, the lion’s
share of our BASIC was good to go. If it didn’t, we’d failed.

I typed in the command: PRINT 2+2.

The machine’s response was instantaneous: 4. That was a magical moment. Ed
exclaimed, “Oh my God, it printed ‘4’!” He’d gone into debt and bet
everything on a full-functioning micro-computer, and now it looked as
though his vision would come true.

“Let’s try a real program,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. Yates pulled
out a book called 101 BASIC Computer Games, a slim volume that DEC had
brought out in 1973. The text-based Lunar Lander program, created long
before computers had graphics capability, was just 35 lines long. Still, I
thought it might build Ed’s confidence. I typed in the program. Yates
launched his lunar module and, after a few tries, settled it safely on the
moon’s surface. Everything in our BASIC had worked.

Ed said, “I want you to come back to my office.” Through a flimsy-looking
doorway, I took a seat in front of his desk and the biggest orange glass
ashtray I had ever seen. Ed was a chain-smoker who’d take two or three
puffs, stub the cigarette out, and light the next one. He’d go through half
a pack in a single conversation.

“You’re the first guys who came in and showed us something,” he said. “We
want you to draw up a license so we can sell this with the Altair. We can
work out the terms later.” I couldn’t stop grinning. Once back at the
hotel, I called Bill, who was thrilled with the news. We were in business
now, for real; in Harvard parlance, we were golden. I hardly needed a plane
to fly back to Boston.

Micro-manager
In the life of any company, a few moments stand out. Signing that original
BASIC contract was a big one for Bill and me. Now our partnership needed a
name. We considered Allen & Gates, but it sounded too much like a law firm.
My next idea: Micro-Soft, for microprocessors and software. While the
typography would be in flux over the next year or so (including a brief
transition as Micro Soft), we both knew instantly that the name was right.
Micro-Soft was simple and straightforward. It conveyed just what we were
about.

From the time we’d started together in Massachusetts, I’d assumed that our
partnership would be a 50-50 proposition. But Bill had another idea. “It’s
not right for you to get half,” he said. “You had your salary at MITS while
I did almost everything on BASIC without one back in Boston. I should get
more. I think it should be 60-40.”

At first I was taken aback. But as I pondered it, Bill’s position didn’t
seem unreasonable. I’d been coding what I could in my spare time, and
feeling guilty that I couldn’t do more, but Bill had been instrumental in
packing our software with “more features per byte of memory than any other
BASIC we know,” as I’d written for Computer Notes. All in all, I thought, a
60-40 split might be fair.

A short time later, we licensed BASIC to NCR for $175,000. Even with half
the proceeds going to Ed Roberts, that single fee would pay five or six
programmers for a year.

Bill’s intensity was nonstop, and when he asked me for a walk-and-talk one
day, I knew something was up. We’d gone a block when he cut to the chase:
“I’ve done most of the work on BASIC, and I gave up a lot to leave
Harvard,” he said. “I deserve more than 60 percent.”

“How much more?”

“I was thinking 64-36.”

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)