CHAPTER FIVE
Keystones
When he was seventeen years old, Bill Gates worked with Paul Allen to develop a BASIC compiler for the newly introduced MITS Altair microcomputer. After Gates had the compiler working (it used less than four kilobytes of memory and was carried around on a paper tape), he went to all the microcomputer manufacturers of the time and somehow managed to convince them to make his compiler the standard on each of their machines. Few people remember that back in 1980, when you booted an Apple I or a TRS-80 computer, what you got was Microsoft BASIC. Gates thus introduced one of the first real standards in the microcomputer industry—a programming tool that would enable the emergent community of microcomputer programmers to ...
