Idea Man

by Paul Allen

  Hovering over the computer was Bill Yates, a sallow, taciturn string bean of a man with wire-rimmed glasses—Stan Laurel to Ed’s Oliver Hardy. He was running a memory test to make sure the machine would be ready for me, with the cover flipped up so I could see inside. Plugged into slots on the Altair bus, an Ed Roberts innovation that was to become the industry standard, were seven 1K static memory cards. It might have been the only microprocessor in the world with that much random-access memory, more than enough for my demo. The machine was hooked up to a Teletype with a paper-tape reader. All seemed in order.

  It was getting late, and Ed suggested that we put off the BASIC trial to the next morning. “How about dinner?” he said. He took me to a three-dollar buffet at a Mexican place called Pancho’s, where you got what you paid for. Afterward, back in the truck, a yellowjacket flew in and stung me on the neck. And I thought, This is all kind of surreal. Ed said he’d drop me at the hotel that he’d booked for me, which I’d thought would be along the lines of a Motel 6. I’d only brought forty dollars; I was chronically low on cash, and it would be years before I’d have a credit card. I blanched when Ed pulled up to the Sheraton, the nicest hotel in town, and escorted me to the reception desk.

  “Checking in?” the clerk said. “That will be fifty dollars.”

  It was one of the more embarrassing moments of my life. “Ed, I’m sorry about this,” I stammered, “but I don’t have that kind of cash.”

  He just looked at me for a minute; I guess I wasn’t what he’d been expecting, either. Then he said, “That’s OK, we’ll put it on my card.”

  Alone in my room, I called Bill and said, “They’ve got the computer working.” We were excited but also nervous, because the next day would tell the tale.

  The following morning, with Ed and Bill Yates hanging over my shoulder, I sat at the Altair console and toggled in my bootstrap loader on the front panel’s switches, byte by byte. Unlike the flat plastic keys on the PDP-8, the Altair’s were thin metal switches, tough on the fingers. It took about five minutes, and I hoped no one noticed how nervous I was. This isn’t going to work, I kept thinking.

  I entered my twenty-first instruction, set the starting address, and pressed the run switch. The machine’s lights took on a diffused red glow as the 8080 executed the loader’s multiple steps—at least that much seemed to be working. I turned on the paper-tape reader, and the Teletype chugged as it pulled our BASIC interpreter through. At ten characters per second, reading the tape took seven minutes. (People grabbed coffee breaks while computers loaded paper tape in those days.) The MITS guys stood there silently. At the end I pressed STOP and reset the address to 0. My index finger poised over the RUN switch once again. …

  To that point, I couldn’t be sure of anything. Any one of a thousand things might have gone wrong in the simulator or the interpreter, despite Bill’s double-checking. I pressed RUN. There’s just no way this is going to work.

  The Teletype’s printer clattered to life. I gawked at the uppercase characters; I couldn’t believe it.

  But there it was: MEMORY SIZE?

  “Hey,” said Bill Yates, “it printed something!” It was the first time he or Ed had seen the Altair do anything beyond a small memory test. They were flabbergasted. I was dumbfounded. We all gaped at the machine for a few seconds, and then I typed in the total number of bytes in the seven memory cards: 7168.

  OK, the Altair spit back. Getting this far told me that 5 percent of our BASIC was definitely working, but we weren’t yet home free. The acid test would be a standard command that we’d used as a midterm exam for our software back in Cambridge. It relied on Bill’s core coding and Monte’s floating-point math and even my “crunch” code, which condensed certain words (like “PRINT”) into a single character. If it worked, the lion’s share of our BASIC was good to go. If it didn’t, we’d failed.

  I typed in the command:

  PRINT 2+2

  The machine’s response was instantaneous:

  4

  That was a magical moment. Ed exclaimed, “Oh my god, it printed ‘4’!” He’d gone into debt and bet everything on a full-functioning microcomputer, and now it looked as though his vision would come true. He couldn’t get over the fact that Bill and I had solved the puzzle without any of the hardware—that was astonishing to him. But Ed wasn’t as surprised as I was that our 8080 BASIC had run perfectly its first time out of the chute. The Altair’s one-digit response, the classic kindergarten computation, proved that my simulator was on target. I was quietly ecstatic and deeply, deeply relieved.

  “Let’s try a real program,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. Yates pulled out a book called 101 BASIC Computer Games, a slim volume that DEC brought out in 1973. The text-based Lunar Lander program, created long before computers had graphics capability, was just thirty-five lines long. Still, I thought it might build Ed’s confidence. I typed in the program. Yates launched his lunar module and, after a few tries, settled it safely on the moon’s surface. Everything in our BASIC had worked.

  Ed said, “I want you to come back to my office.” Through a flimsy-looking doorway, I took a seat in front of his desk and the biggest orange glass ashtray I had ever seen. Ed was a chain smoker who’d take two or three puffs, stub the cigarette out, and light the next one. He’d go through half a pack in a single conversation.

  “You’re the first guys who came in and showed us something,” he said. “We want you to draw up a license so we can sell this with the Altair. We can work out the terms later.” I couldn’t stop grinning. Once back at the hotel, I called Bill, who was thrilled with the news. We were in business now, for real; in Harvard parlance, we were golden. I hardly needed a plane to fly back to Boston.

  From Honeywell I’d call Ed periodically with updates. One day he interrupted me: “Stop, stop. How would you like to move down here to New Mexico and run our software group?” Albuquerque felt foreign to me, and I’d only just learned that it wasn’t in Arizona. But the salary was $16,000, a bump from what I was making at Honeywell, and it was hard to refuse an offer to work on the code we’d created. Besides, Bill and I agreed that one of us probably needed to be there to service our customer and ride herd over software distribution. I was the freer agent, and the one who’d received the invitation, so it fell to me.

  I called Ed back and said, “When do you want me to start?”

  To a man, my coworkers declared that I was making a big mistake. It was crazy, they said, to ditch an established firm for some fly-by-night start-up selling hobbyist kits in the desert. “Your job’s safe at Honeywell,” they kept telling me. “You can work here for years.”

  I knew that my move was a risk, but I was disappointed in my colleagues. I wanted to hear something like: Good luck, young fellow, and more power to you. I’m afraid that I was less than gracious in my going-away party speech: “I guess I don’t have anyone to congratulate me for leaving except myself.”

  CHAPTER 7

  MITS

  Ed Roberts was my senior by twelve years, a fact that shaped his first encounter with computers. When he was stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque in the 1960s, its weapons lab had one of the world’s most powerful computer installations: two Control Data Corporation 6600s, the fastest mainframes in captivity. But Ed never got to touch them. He had to hand his batch cards over for processing, “and I always thought it was a bad way to go,” as he later explained. “I thought everybody ought to own their own computer, and I thought that for years and years.”

  In 1969, when I was at C-Cubed, Ed founded a new company in his garage: MITS, for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. He began in the model rocket electronics business, then shifted to handheld electronic calculator kits. When Texas Instruments killed the market with cheap mass-produced models, and MITS was about to go under, Ed turned to the idea that had nagged at him since Kirtland: “a real, fully operational [personal] computer that … could do anything that a general purpose minicomputer of the time
could do.” His “ultimate gadget,” as he called it, would be a sensation if he could pull it off. There was nothing close to it on the market.

  Like me, Ed was following the chips. When he got wind of the 8080 microprocessor, he wangled some handwritten data sheets from an Intel rep before the release date. Looking at the specs, Ed could see that the microprocessor was fast and powerful enough to support the type of computer he’d been talking about, a machine he could sell in kit form for under $400. He made a deal with Intel for a thousand chips at $75 apiece, a steep discount. To get a loan, he told his bank that he could sell eight hundred machines in the first year, or four times as many as his private estimate.

  Within weeks of the Popular Electronics bombshell, prepaid orders flooded into MITS from two thousand customers. Many sent cash for what was basically a proof-of-concept prototype, a bare-bones machine with no keyboard, no display, and just 256 bytes of memory. Because Bill Yates had yet to design the interface cards for a Teletype or audiocassette hookup, the only way to get data into the Altair was through the front-panel switches. A tiny 50-byte program required hundreds of settings in just the right order. But some people didn’t care; they figured they’d buy the Altair now and decide what to use it for later.

  The mail in Ed’s office piled nearly to the ceiling. The balance in his checking account swung a half-million dollars from red to black in six weeks. His skeleton staff, cut from ninety to fewer than twenty after the calculator meltdown, was swamped. Ed found himself at the head of a movement to give people the technology they’d wanted for a long, long time. In the words of David Bunnell, MITS’s vice president of marketing, the Altair “liberated that technology to make it available to anybody who had a brain.”

  I RETURNED TO Albuquerque as MITS’s “director of software development” just after Easter, in April 1975. After asking for two weeks’ salary in advance, I moved into the Sand and Sage Motel on Central Avenue, the old Route 66, just across the street from the Cal-Linn building—a strong selling point, because I had no car. (I’d left the Chrysler with Bill, who lent it to an acquaintance. It disappeared for good after that.)

  The MITS software department was at the far end of the building, next to a vacuum cleaner repair shop. Our space was maybe a thousand square feet: a walk-in reception area with our terminals along one wall, and then a row of doorless cubbyholes that barely held a desk and two chairs apiece. I took the one at the front—I had my pick, as I had no staff. A month later, I’d be joined by Gary Runyan, whom Ed had hired to create an internal accounting system, and a month after that, I got a secretary. To keep the office from getting too noisy, Gary would wheel the Teletype into the bathroom whenever he printed out a listing.

  I’d come at a frenetic time, with all hands on deck to answer customer phone calls and sort through the growing order backlog. A few days after I arrived, the company published the first issue of Computer Notes, edited by David Bunnell, one of the first periodicals devoted to microcomputers. On his inaugural front page, David hailed our software’s arrival: “Altair BASIC—Up and Running.” Though we were still months from shipping, Ed Roberts knew that our software gave the Altair a strategic edge over the competition that was sure to follow. Our relationship was perfectly symbiotic. Bill and I benefited from Ed’s distribution and marketing networks, while MITS, a classic early innovator, got out front with our programmer-friendly language and dedicated support and upgrades.

  While Bill cranked away at Harvard to build our BASIC’s more powerful 8K and 12K versions, I spent my days consulting with Bill Yates and helping with technical questions from our growing client base. I put the machine through its paces for visiting reps and took an unending stream of calls from frustrated buyers. It wasn’t easy to assemble an Altair, which required more than a thousand solder connections before you could power it on. Some of our customers were engineers, but others were lawyers and dentists and car mechanics with no background in computer technology. After taking months to finish the assembly, they’d labor to toggle in a small demo routine. Then they’d call me.

  CUSTOMER: I don’t think my Altair works.

  ME: Are all the lights on in front?

  CUSTOMER: Yes, they’re all on, but it still doesn’t work.

  ME: OK, you’re going to have to buy some memory.

  CUSTOMER: Oh yeah, memory. What’s that?

  Here was the problem: To boost its profit margin, MITS had stopped shipping the minuscule 256-byte memory card that was bundled with the first batch of $398 kit machines. When you booted up a machine without a card, all the lights went on simultaneously, a bad sign. I’d tell the poor customers that they’d need at least 1K static memory ($176 in kit form) or a 4K dynamic memory board ($264). Few seemed irritated or angry at the news. They were just happy to have their own computer, and I knew how they felt. I’d been thrilled when Ed gave me an Altair to use at home.

  Some callers were a little odd. One began, “I’m having a problem, listen to this.” The next thing I heard was the sound of a dial-up modem, a horrendous screech that nearly ruptured my eardrum. The caller said, “Does that sound like RS-232 to you?” I told him that I couldn’t diagnose his problem by ear, then walked him through the solution.

  Eddie Currie, Ed Roberts’s general manager and milder alter ego, got one customer who insisted that his Altair wouldn’t work right because he and the computer had a personality conflict. Eddie said, “Well, how do you think we can resolve this?”

  And the customer said, “Maybe you could send me another Altair with a personality more like mine.”

  AFTER HARVARD LET out for the summer, Bill and Monte joined me in Albuquerque. We rented a furnished two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of the Portals, a five-minute drive from MITS. It was a standard medium-rise apartment building, with shag carpeting and a courtyard swimming pool that we never used. Later we added Chris Larson, a younger Lakeside student who’d originally been conscripted for Traf-O-Data. Bill and I each took a bedroom, while Monte and Chris made do with the couch or floor.

  In need of transportation, I bought my first new car, a metallic blue hatchback Chevy Monza. Bill came with me to pick it up, and we had a hilarious time getting it home. I’d never used a stick shift before, and I’d pop the clutch and stall every twenty feet. Bill tried, with similar results. The Monza was a high-powered little number with a V-8 engine and an undersize clutch that I’d burn out once a year.

  I did MITS business all day, then stayed on as Bill, Monte, and Chris trickled in to work on our BASIC. I’d arranged a cheap timesharing deal with the local school district, which made its PDP-10 available late in the afternoon. After editing our programs on the trusty ASR-33 Teletype, we’d have someone shoot down each day to the schools’ office and pick up our listings from their fast line printer. Later on we’d lease a DECwriter terminal and install it in our living room.

  Our day’s highlights were our meals: Furr’s Cafeteria for chicken-fried steak; Mr. Powdrell’s Barbecue for beef sandwiches, with old Mr. Powdrell still tending the smoker; Long John Silver’s when we missed Seattle seafood. After hours, we’d often wind up at Denny’s, where we’d be so revved up from our work that we’d freak out the waitresses. I remember a night when one of them looked from one pale face to the next and asked, “Are you guys speeding?”

  “No,” Monte replied, “we’re programmers.”

  After dinner we often took in the latest action movie before heading back to the office to code for hours. When I finally got home, I’d unwind by plugging in my Stratocaster and trying to play along with Aerosmith or Jimi Hendrix. (Monte preferred Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Bill played R & B or sang at the top of his lungs to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”) One night, as I lay in my bed in the dark, someone pushed through my window and into my room. I shouted and he fled. A few nights later, I found my prized Stratocaster gone.

  As the summer wore on, Bill and Monte fell into the habit of working until sunup or whenever the school system said we had to st
op. I can picture Bill debugging BASIC on a Teletype in the corner, flipping through the printout listing in his lap and typing with fierce intensity. He lived in binary states: either bursting with nervous energy on his dozen Cokes a day, or dead to the world. He’d work until drained and then curl up on the floor in his office and be asleep within fifteen seconds. Sometimes I’d return to MITS in the morning and see Bill’s feet sticking out of his office doorway in a pair of scuffed loafers.

  Working the equivalent of two jobs and programming on the weekends, I logged crazy hours myself. One day blurred into the next, as my journal attests:

  7:30 AM—left work for home. Ate omelet. Sleep.

  4:00 Work. Meet w/Eddie & Chamberlin. Want to know royalty situation.

  6:00 Dinner.

  7:00 Work—organic stuff. Can’t find notebook, where is it?!

  9:45 Go home for a while. Sleep.

  2:00 Wake up. Go to work. Put tables in BASIC.

  That was life in Albuquerque: so much code, so little time.

  BY JULY 1975, our 4K and 8K BASICs were ready to ship. Prepping the orders with a hand-powered winder, I’d thread in the paper tape, hook my finger in one of the winder’s holes, and spin, a big advance over rolling by hand. We were thrilled to see those tapes boxed for shipping—our baby, going out into the world.

  In Boston and the Bay Area, in labs and corporations like Honeywell, microcomputers were viewed as a passing fad. But the doubters didn’t faze us. We were certain that the tech establishment was wrong and we were right, and the proof came each day in the mail sacks bulging with orders for the Altair and our BASIC. In that little ramshackle building in Albuquerque, it felt as though anything was possible.