For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he
seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester, and he said glumly,
“I have a math professor who got his Ph.D. at 16.” The course was purely
theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to 30 hours a week. Bill put
everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he
might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there
were people who were one in a million or one in 10 million, and some of
them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that
room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his
major to applied math.

Through the spring semester of 1974, Bill kept urging me to move to Boston.
We could find work together as programmers, he said; some local firms
sounded interested. We’d come up with some exciting project. In any case,
we’d have fun. Why not give it a try?

Drifting at Washington State, I was ready to take a flier. I mailed my
résumé to a dozen computer companies in the Boston area and got a $12,500
job offer from Honeywell. If Boston didn’t work out, I could always return
to school. In the meantime, I’d sample a new part of the country, and my
girlfriend, Rita, had agreed to join me. We had grown more serious and
wanted to live together as a trial run for marriage. Plus, Bill would be
there. At a minimum, we could put our heads together on the weekends.

Rita and I had come to New England knowing two people. One was a brilliant,
troubled Lakesider who would insinuate that he was working for the Mafia.
Then there was Bill. Rita had roasted a chicken one night for dinner and
couldn’t take her eyes off him. “Did you see that?” she said after he’d
left. “He ate his chicken with a spoon. I have never in my life seen anyone
eat chicken with a spoon.” When Bill was thinking hard about something, he
paid no heed to social convention. Once, he offered Rita fashion
advice—basically, to buy all your clothes in the same style and colors and
save time by not having to match them. For Bill, that meant any sweater
that went with tan slacks.

Each time I brought an idea to Bill, he would pop my balloon. “That would
take a bunch of people and a lot of money,” he’d say. Or “That sounds
really complicated. We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he’d remind me. “What
we know is software.” And he was right. My ideas were ahead of their time
or beyond our scope or both. It was ridiculous to think that two young guys
in Boston could beat IBM on its own turf. Bill’s reality checks stopped us
from wasting time in areas where we had scant chance of success.

So when the right opportunity surfaced, as it did that December, it got my
full attention: an open invitation by the MITS company, in Albuquerque, to
build a programming language for their new Altair microcomputer, intended
for the hobbyist market.

Some have suggested that our Altair basic was remarkable because we created
it without ever seeing an Altair or even a sample Intel 8080, the
microprocessor it would run on. What we did was unprecedented, but what is
less well understood is that we had no choice. The Altair was little more
than a bare-bones box with a C.P.U.-on-a-chip inside. It had no hard drive,
no floppy disk, no place to edit or store programs.

We moved into Harvard’s Aiken Computation Lab, on Oxford Street, a one-story
concrete building with an under-utilized time-sharing system. The clock was
ticking on us from the start. Bill had told Ed Roberts, MITS’S co-founder
and C.E.O., that our BASIC was nearly complete, and Ed said he’d like to
see it in a month or so, when in point of fact we didn’t even have an 8080
instruction manual.

In building our homegrown basic, we borrowed bits and pieces of our design
from previous versions, a long-standing software tradition. Languages
evolve; ideas blend together; in computer technology, we all stand on
others’ shoulders. As the weeks passed, we got immersed in the mission—as
far as we knew, we were building the first native high-level programming
language for a microprocessor. Occasionally we wondered if some group at
M.I.T. or Stanford might beat us, but we’d quickly regain focus. Could we
pull it off? Could we finish this thing and close the deal in Albuquerque?
Yeah, we could! We had the energy and the skill, and we were hell-bent on
seizing the opportunity.

We worked till all hours, with double shifts on weekends. Bill basically
stopped going to class. Monte Davidoff, a Harvard freshman studying
advanced math who had joined us, overslept his one-o’clock French section.
I neglected my job at Honeywell, dragging into the office at noon. I’d stay
until 5:30, and then it was back to Aiken until three or so in the morning.
I’d save my files, crash for five or six hours, and start over. We’d break
for dinner at Harvard House of Pizza or get the pupu platter at Aku Aku, a
local version of Trader Vic’s. I had a weakness for their egg rolls and
butterflied shrimp.

I’d occasionally catch Bill grabbing naps at his terminal during our
late-nighters. He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually
tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard. After dozing for an hour
or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume
precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat of concentration.

Working so closely together, the three of us developed a strong camaraderie.
Because our program ran on top of the multi-user TOPS-10 operating system,
we could all work simultaneously. We staged nightly competitions to squeeze
a sub-routine—a small portion of code within a program that performs a
specific task—into the fewest instructions, taking notepads to separate
corners of the room and scrawling away. Then someone would say, “I can do
it in nine.” And someone else would call out, “Well, I can do it in five!”

A few years ago, when I reminisced with Monte about those days, he compared
programming to writing a novel—a good analogy, I thought, for our approach
to Altair BASIC. At the beginning we outlined our plot, the conceptual
phase of the coding. Then we took the big problem and carved it into its
component chapters, from the hundreds of sub-routines to their related data
structures, before putting all the parts back together.

By late February, eight weeks after our first contact with MITS, the
interpreter (which would save space by executing one snippet of code at a
time) was done. Shoehorned into about 3,200 bytes, roughly 2,000 lines of
code, it was one tight little BASIC—stripped down, for sure, but robust for
its size. No one could have beaten the functionality and speed crammed into
that tiny footprint of memory: “The best piece of work we ever did,” as
Bill told me recently. And it was a true collaboration. I’d estimate that
45 percent of the code was Bill’s, 30 percent Monte’s, and 25 percent mine,
excluding my development tools.

All things considered, it was quite an achievement for three people our age.
If you checked that software today, I believe it would stack up against
anything written by our old mentors. Bill and I had grown into crack
programmers. And we were just getting started.

As I got ready to go to Albuquerque, Bill began to worry. What if I’d
screwed up one of the numbers used to represent the 8080 instructions in
the macro assembler? Our BASIC had tested out fine on my simulator on the
PDP-10, but we had no sure evidence that the simulator itself was flawless.
A single character out of place might halt the program cold when it ran on
the real chip. The night before my departure, after I knocked off for a few
hours of sleep, Bill stayed up with the 8080 manual and triple-checked my
macros. He was bleary-eyed the next morning when I stopped by en route to
Logan Airport to pick up the fresh paper tape he’d punched out. The byte
codes were correct, Bill said. As far as he could tell, my work was
error-free.

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