Table of Contents
^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.
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