Criticism from Professional Designer

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

...which eventually resulted in Altair BASIC, the first product of a company originally called Micro-Soft...

Sounds to had been the intial home computers times era then, aka when the first such soldered together devices originated, so to say things I've once read about in the "Silicon Valley Story" book or "S. Jobs" book. - Well, when I started with computers and programming etc. things like MS Basic were more a swearword, evil and not the route you wanted to take or should go at all. 😀😉

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Sounds to had been the intial home computers times era then, aka when the first such soldered together devices originated, so to say things I've once read about in the "Silicon Valley Story" book or "S. Jobs" book. - Well, when I started with computers and programming etc. things like MS Basic were more a swearword, evil and not the route you wanted to take or should go at all. 😀😉

The details are a bit fuzzy in my tired old wetware but as I remember it the Altair they brought over did not have a BASIC interpreter of any kind installed on it, evil or otherwise. That could have been because this happened before the meeting with Allen & Gates occurred or if it was after because they did not want to tell anyone about it until the deal was finalized.

According to one account I read about that meeting, Gates hammered out the boot code while he was in a seedy 4th St. Albuquerque hotel. If true, that would have been within a mile or two of our shop. Of course, at the time we had no idea how close we were to any of this or its historic significance. In fact, we were of the opinion that the Altair was just an expensive toy, a curiosity that very few people would ever be interested in.

Turns out we were not quite right about that.... 🤔

[v_kyr]

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

...In fact, we were of the opinion that the Altair was just an expensive toy, a curiosity that very few people would ever be interested in.

AFAIK the first such devices were indeed quite expensive and rare those days, since I believe there were only few handpicked models and/or building kits avaiable. Programming wise, I think plain pre-assemblers and early basic dialects (those with the line number GOTO hell) were first only available. Thus the whole was first at all maybe more for nerds, engineers and early computer adopters interesting. - Overall some years passed then until PCs were more mainstream and slightly cheaper in acquisition price.

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

AFAIK the first such devices were indeed quite expensive and rare those days, since I believe there were only few handpicked models and/or building kits avaiable.

The first Altair computers were kits. I think the main reason the MITS guys showed us the prototype was to see if we would be interested in assembling a few so they could be sold pre-assembled, but that was never really discussed much, probably because they realized our hourly rates would make them too expensive.

38 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Overall some years passed then until PCs were more mainstream and slightly cheaper in acquisition price.

More than a decade passed before Photoshop 1.0 was released, at that time a Mac-only app.

[foto-grafic]

43 minutes ago, R C-R said:

More than a decade passed before Photoshop 1.0 was released, at that time a Mac-only app.

Perfect, that's right, we went back to the beginning of my speech (after some digressions);
I do not think that many remember him, then caused a sensation, it was an absolute novelty but comparing it to today would snatch a few smiles, don't you think ...? 😀

[Cecil]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

make them too expensive.

@R C-R Back then the hourly rate was $2.00, lol.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Cecil said:

@R C-R Back then the hourly rate was $2.00, lol.

Our rate was about 10 times that, $4/hr cheaper than our only serious competitor. With only 4 bench techs, we had all the business we could handle so it would not have made any sense to pull them off jobs to assemble kit computers at a lower rate.