"If, like my ZDNET colleague David Gerwitz and I, you were tinkering with computers in 1975, you badly wanted an MITS Altair 8080 computer, the first PC. To build software on it, most of us used Altair BASIC. A pair of college dropouts named Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the language. Then they formed a company, Micro-Soft, to sell it. You know that company better as Microsoft."
"That's because it was the first high-level language for many of the early PCs, such as the Apple II, Commodore PET, VIC-20, and one of the first important gaming platforms, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Now, the ancient 6502 assembly code language has been open-sourced under the MIT License. The Bill Gates of 1976 would have been shocked to see this. He hated the idea of people using MS-BASIC for free . In a widely distributed letter, Gates wrote, "Most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?""
MS-BASIC began as Altair BASIC written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen for the MITS Altair 8080. Micro-Soft formed to sell the language and rebranded Altair BASIC as Microsoft BASIC 1.1 in 1976, porting it from the 8080 to the MOS 6502 microprocessor. MS-BASIC became the first high-level language on many early personal computers, including the Apple II, Commodore PET, VIC-20, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. The 6502 assembly code for MS-BASIC has been released under the MIT License. Bill Gates originally opposed free distribution and publicly criticized unpaid copying of software in a widely distributed letter.
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