The Altair’s open hacker culture directly enabled Microsoft’s founding.

Evidence

The first microcomputer available for home use, the Altair 8800, illustrates how this hacker ethic influenced the development of new technologies. It appeared on the cover of Popular Mechanics in 1975, and unlike today’s home computers, came as a bundle of circuit boards and transistors that had to be soldered together by hand. The company manufacturing the hardware, MITS, could barely keep up with the demand and worked directly with hardware hackers to improve the product, giving out data sheets on the chips and encouraging hobbyists to write code for the machine and build devices like input-output boards and joysticks. In 1976, two college students surmised that MITS would need some sort of operating system; they called the company and proposed a version of BASIC for the Altair. BASIC is a programming language appropriate for a computer like the Altair, which doesn’t have a lot of storage space. One of the students hacked a version of BASIC together in eight weeks. The other flew to Albuquerque to pitch it to MITS, who bought it. The two students were Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who promptly quit school to found Microsoft. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 72

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• CANDY: Bill Gates — later the symbol of proprietary software — launched his company by hacking a BASIC port for an open hardware platform, eight weeks of work.
• XREF: A concrete case of how a norm of openness (‘information wants to be free’) paradoxically seeded a proprietary corporate giant — a type case for the commodification of community norms that Web 2.0 repeats.

Related

• Microsoft was founded out of the homebrew hobbyist hacker scene (similarity 0.95)
• Gates’s open letter forced the hacker community to confront paid versus free software (similarity 0.79)