The flight was uneventful up until the plane’s final descent, when it hit me
that we’d forgotten something: a bootstrap loader, the small sequence of
instructions to tell the Altair how to read the BASIC interpreter and then
stick it into memory. A loader was a necessity for microprocessors in the
pre-ROM era; without one, that yellow tape in my briefcase would be
worthless. I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it at Aiken, where I
could have coded it without rushing and simulated and debugged it on the
PDP-10.

Now time was short. Minutes before landing, I grabbed a steno pad and began
scribbling the loader code in machine language—no labels, no symbols, just
a series of three-digit numbers in octal (base 8), the lingua franca for
Intel’s chips. Each number represented one byte, a single instruction for
the 8080; I knew most of them by heart. “Hand assembly” is a famously
laborious process, even in small quantities. I finished the program in 21
bytes—not my most concise work, but I was too rushed to strive for
elegance.

I came out of the terminal sweating and dressed in my professional best, a
tan Ultrasuede jacket and tie. Ed Roberts was supposed to pick me up, so I
stood there for 10 minutes looking for someone in a business suit. Not far
down the entryway to the airport, a pickup truck pulled up and a big,
burly, jowly guy—six feet four, maybe 280 pounds—climbed out. He had on
jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with a string tie, the first one I’d seen
outside of a Western. He came up to me, and in a booming southern accent he
asked, “Are you Paul Allen?” His wavy black hair was receding at the front.

I said, “Yes, are you Ed?”

He said, “Come on, get in the truck.”

As we bounced over the city’s sunbaked streets, I wondered how all this was
going to turn out. I’d expected a high-powered executive from some
cutting-edge entrepreneurial firm, like the ones clustered along Route 128,
the high-tech beltway around Boston. The reality had a whole different
vibe. (On a later trip to Albuquerque, I came down from a plane and got hit
in the head by tumbleweed on the tarmac. I wasn’t in Massachusetts
anymore.)

Ed said, “Let’s go over to MITS so you can see the Altair.” He drove into a
low-rent commercial area by the state fairgrounds and stopped at a
one-story strip mall. With its brick façade and big plate-glass windows,
the Cal-Linn Building might have looked modern in 1955. A beauty salon
occupied one storefront around the corner. I followed Ed through a glass
door and into a light industrial space that housed MITS’s engineering and
manufacturing departments. As I passed an assembly line of a dozen or so
weary-looking workers, stuffing kit boxes with capacitors and Mylar circuit
boards, I understood why Ed was so focused on getting a BASIC. He had
little interest in software, which he referred to as variable hardware, but
he knew that the Altair’s sales wouldn’t keep expanding unless it could do
something useful.

When I arrived, there were only two or three assembled computers in the
whole plant; everything else had gone out the door. Ed led me to a messy
workbench, where I found a sky-blue metal box with ALTAIR 8800 stenciled on
a charcoal-gray front panel. Modeled after a popular minicomputer, with
rows of toggle switches for input and flashing red L.E.D.’s for output, the
Altair was 7 inches high by 18 inches wide. It seemed fantastic that such a
small box could contain a general-purpose computer with a legitimate C.P.U.

Hovering over the computer was Bill Yates, a sallow, taciturn string bean of
a man with wire-rimmed glasses—Stan Laurel to Ed’s Oliver Hardy. He was
running a memory test to make sure the machine would be ready for me, with
the cover flipped up so I could see inside. Plugged into slots on the
Altair bus—an Ed Roberts innovation that was to become the industry
standard—were seven 1K static-memory cards. It might have been the only
microprocessor in the world with that much random-access memory, more than
enough for my demo. The machine was hooked up to a Teletype with a
paper-tape reader. All seemed in order.

It was getting late, and Ed suggested that we put off the BASIC trial to the
next morning. “How about dinner?” he said. He took me to a three-dollar
buffet at a Mexican place called Pancho’s, where you got what you paid for.
Afterward, back in the truck, a yellow jacket flew in and stung me on the
neck. And I thought, This is all kind of surreal. Ed said he’d drop me at
the hotel that he’d booked for me, which I’d thought would be something
like a Motel 6. I’d brought only $40; I was chronically low on cash, and it
would be years before I’d have a credit card. I blanched when Ed pulled up
to the Sheraton, the nicest hotel in town, and escorted me to the reception
desk.

“Checking in?” the clerk said. “That will be $50.”

It was one of the more embarrassing moments of my life. “Ed, I’m sorry about
this,” I stammered, “but I don’t have that kind of cash.”

He just looked at me for a minute; I guess I wasn’t what he’d been
expecting, either. Then he said, “That’s O.K., we’ll put it on my card.”

The following morning, with Ed and Bill Yates hanging over my shoulder, I
sat at the Altair console and toggled in my bootstrap loader on the front
panel’s switches, byte by byte. Unlike the flat plastic keys on the PDP-8,
the Altair’s were thin metal switches, tough on the fingers. It took about
five minutes, and I hoped no one noticed how nervous I was. This isn’t
going to work, I kept thinking.

I entered my 21st instruction, set the starting address, and pressed the Run
switch. The machine’s lights took on a diffused red glow as the 8080
executed the loader’s multiple steps—at least that much seemed to be
working. I turned on the paper-tape reader, and the Teletype chugged as it
pulled our BASIC interpreter through. At 10 characters per second, reading
the tape took seven minutes. (People grabbed coffee breaks while computers
loaded paper tape in those days.) The MITS guys stood there silently. At
the end I pressed Stop and reset the address to 0. My index finger poised
over the Run switch once again …

To that point, I couldn’t be sure of anything. Any one of a thousand things
might have gone wrong in the simulator or the interpreter, despite Bill’s
double-checking. I pressed Run. There’s just no way this is going to work.

The Teletype’s printer clattered to life. I gawked at the uppercase
characters; I couldn’t believe it.

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