Having formed a company mere months before, Micro-Soft – in the persons of young Bill Gates and Paul Allen – make good on their sales pitch to develop a workable BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800 microcomputer. The manufacturer of the Altair, MITS, licenses Micro-Soft BASIC from Gates and Allen, who have put college and everything else on hold to move to Albuquerque to work with the company. Over the next few years, the newly-founded Micro-Soft will create versions of BASIC for other emerging computer systems, and will collide with the free-sharing ethos of computer hobbyist groups, resulting in some of the earliest accusations of computer software piracy.
