^9/08/89 11:43 U206 883 8101 MICROSOFT CORP.. 12)002 Table of Contents m-^mm Table of Contaits 09/08/89 11:44 'Q206 883 8101 MICROSOFT CORP _ _ [ 1003 The Story Begins JAN The story of MS-DOS_begins ..in a hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 1975 In 1975, Albuquerque was the home of Micro Instrumentation'Telemetry MiTS introduces the 8080-baseci Systems, better known as MITS- In January of that year, MITS had intro- Altair computer. duced a kit computer called the Altair. When it was first snipped, the Altair consisted of a metal box with, a panel of switches for input and output, a power supply, and-two boards. One board was the CPU.. At its heart was the 8-bit 8080 microprocessor chip from InteL The other board provided 256 bytes of memory. The Altair had no keyboard, no monitor, and no permanent storage. But it had a revolutionary price tag. It cost $397. For the first time, the term "personal computer" acquired a real-world meaning. The real world of the Altair was not, however, the world of business computing. It was-primarily the world of the computer hobbyist These first users of the microcomputer were not as interested in using spreadsheets and word processors as they were in programming. Accordingly, the first soft- ware for the Altair was a programming language. And the company that developed it was a two-man firm, in Albuquerque, called Microsoft FEB The two men at MiCTosof^ej^PailjAJten^and Bffl Gates-Allen and 1975 Gates-had met when-they were both students at Lakeside High School in Microsoft sails first BASIC to Seattle, where they began their computer-science education oa the school's MITS lor Altair time-sharing terminal By the time Gates had graduated, me two of them had computer. already founded a company called Traf-O-Data. Traf-O-Datas main product was a machine based on the 8008 microprocessor, which was the predecessor of the Altair's 808.0 chip. The Traf-O-Data machine automated the process of reading 16-channel, 4-digit, binary-coded decimal (BCD) tapes generated by traffic recorders to monitor traffic flow. Unfortunately, the company faced tough competition from state-owned—and therefore state-subsidized— processing facilities. Nevertheless, the experience with Traf-O-Data and the 8008 microprocessor gave Allen and Gales a running start when the Altair was introduced They used their running start to write a version of BASIC for the S080 and sold it to MITS. It was Microsoft's first product. Originally, the only way to enter Microsoft's BASIC into the Altair was to flip the switches on the front panel to enter the machine code into the computer's memory. This process was soon automated by paper tapes that could store and load the code. But Allen, who had taken a position as Direc- tor of Software at MITS, quickly realized that a disk drive was the real The Historical Vie;-: 09/08/89 11:44 ©206. 883 8101 MICROSOFT CORP solution to entering and storing code. So in February 1976, he asked Gates if he could write a disk-based version of BASIC. Since the Altair had no operat- ing system and hence no method of managing files, the disk BASIC would also have to include some file-management routines. In other words, it would have to function as a rudimentary operating system. FEB That's when Gates, who was still a student at Harvard, flew to Albu- 1976 querque, checked into the HiltonHotel with a stack of yellow legal.pads, and Gates writes first Disk BASIC. asked not to be disturbed. Five days later, he checked out of the hotel, yellow pads filled, and started typing code into a DEC PDP-11 mainframe, on which time was leased from the Albuquerque public school system. After five days, Disk BASIC was up and running on the Altair. Disk BASIC used a file-management strategy based on a file allocation table. The more conventional approach to file management was to include .disk-allocation-information with each file. In Disk BASIC, all of mis informa- tion was kept in one location; the file allocation table. Gates chose this strat- egy for its speed. ALfew years later, when Microsoft wrote a stand-alone version of BASIC for the new 16-bit 8086 chip, they used -the same approach. The file-handling routines in stand-alone Disk BASIC became, in turn, the model for the operating system that would eventually be known as MS-DOS. But in 1976, people weren't thinking about 16-bit operating systems. They were thinking about 8-bit operating systems. Both users and developers were beginning-to recognize the limitations of running applications on top of BASIC or some other language. MITS even- ''There was such a lower tually used the code from Gates' Disk BASIC of Babel in operating sys- to build an operating system for the Altair, tems. But then Lifeboat Another company, Digital Research, headed ' Associates came along by Gary Kildall, had developed an operating and started actually offer- system called Control Program, for Microcom- ing software in CPIM-80 puters, or CP/M, a couple of years earlier. As format. It was probably new companies began to compete with the Lifeboat Associates more Altair for the microcomputer market, some of than anybody who really them sold CP/M as their operating system. But got tilings going." most introduced their own operating systems. — Bill Gates The result was chaos_ JUL . : At Microsoft, Gates and Allen continued 1977 Microsoft intro- to focus their attention on programming languages. They developed different duces FORTRAN versions of BASIC to run on the various operating systems that were appear- for 8080 ing. 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But they also couldn't ignore the earning potential of this strategy, particularly with the growing popularity of the Apple H based on the 6502. microprocessor. Allen found the solution: turn the Apple II into a Z80 sys- tem. To accomplish this metamorphosis, Microsoft developed the SoftCard, The SoftCard was a Z80 microprocessor and a ROM version of the CP/M BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) on a plug-in card, with CP/M itself on disk. Microsoft licensed CP/M-80 from Digital Research for a fixed, one-time fee of $46,000. With CP/M-80 on the SoftCard, Apple users could run any of the programs and languages designed to run on the CP/M machines, includ- ing all of Microsoft's languages.