Saved Altair 4K BASIC

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Wed Nov 11 09:01:30 1998

At 02:34 PM 11/10/98 PST, Max Eskin wrote:
>That seems sort of overpriced. I mean, 4 kilobytes of code for $150? Was
>this a reasonable price at the time, or were there similar programs for
>less?

Max, how old were you in 1978? :-) Let's see, $150 in 1978 would be
at least $500 in today's dollars, maybe 12 cents a hand-crafted byte.
Today's Visual C 5.0 is about 131 megs installed at about $500, or
about seven decimal places in the less expensive direction.

At 01:56 AM 11/11/98 -0000, Eric Smith wrote:
>
>What made people think that a good BASIC interpreter and a Disk Operating
>System were worth $350 and $500, respectively? Seems ludicrous even in
>in 1998 dollars; in 1976 dollars that was utterly insane.

It's all a matter of time, place and comparison. What was DEC charging
for a box, OS and BASIC at the time?

At 10:42 PM 11/10/98 -0600, Paul Braun wrote:
>
>Considering that BASIC was a language developed and written by somebody
>else, and that Gates & Allen simply took someone else's language and
>adapted it for a specific machine (like, say, for example, QDOS) (OK, they
paid
>a little for it. But it started out as someone else's..) it still seems
kinda odd that
>he would get so bent out of shape about somebody stealing a copy of the
>program that he himself stole.
>But who are we to question. He managed to turn that skill into a tidy sum.

Gates & Allen created their own BASIC from scratch. They didn't steal
anything. Microsoft BASIC, like most BASICs, had its own variations
and wasn't Dartmouth BASIC. Sheesh, they even wrote their own PDP-based
cross-assembler in order to cut tapes to load into the Altair. And yes,
they bought QDOS for ~$50K from someone who wasn't making much money with it.
That's business.

>My experience (and knowledge gained from talking to Bob Cringely) is that
>Bill's PR machine is trained from birth to say "No." and "I'm sorry,
>but there's no way in hell you can talk to Bill."
>You can try, but I'm pretty sure your requests will go through several
>layers of filtering and firewalls and end up in "File 13" without
>anyone actually reading it or bringing it to Chairman Bill's attention.

I blame the media. About three weeks before the Wall Street Journal and
several other publications printed Gates' personal e-mail address in
early 1993, I was engaged in an e-mail conversation with him. I had
no reason to assume I was talking to anyone but him.

At 10:21 PM 11/10/98 -0800, Sam Ismail wrote:
>
>Absolutely. I agree 100%. If he had priced it in the range that a
>hobbyist could afford, and proportionate to the cost of the system ($500
>for the kit?) then people would buy it. Its nothing to throw down $25 or
>$50 if you're getting a manual and support with that.

Pish-posh. In 1978, we're talking about a bunch of scroungy ex-
or current- ham radio operators who'd cross the street to pick up
two pennies on the sidewalk. Even today, why do people routinely
pirate software that can be had for $20 in the CompUSA discount bin?

- John
Received on Wed Nov 11 1998 - 09:01:30 GMT