Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber

Author:Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber [Hobart, Byrne & Huber, Tobias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stripe Press
Published: 2024-11-18T18:30:00+00:00

The PC wave

Following the introduction of its first general-purpose chip, Intel kept upgrading. The 4004 was followed by the 8-bit 8008, which had 52 percent more transistors, in 1972, which was followed by the 8080, which had 71 percent more transistors than the 8008, in 1974.

In one sense, the 8080 was just another data point in Moore’s straightforward extrapolation. But in another sense it was a watershed moment, because the 8080 was the first chip powerful and affordable enough to power a personal computer. In response, MITS, an Albuquerque-based company, did exactly that. Its new computer, the Altair, didn’t look like much. It was essentially a box with a row of switches, which could be used to input binary code, and a row of lights, which could display the output. With careful troubleshooting and extensive effort—not to mention some soldering, as the computer was shipped as a box of parts—a diligent programmer could make the Altair display a sequence like “*” “****” “*********” “****************” (the first four perfect squares).

While the personal computer was not yet particularly useful, the idea of a personal computer made waves. The Altair was featured on the cover of the magazine Popular Electronics in January 1975, which promptly led to a run on the Altair. It also caught the attention of a Harvard undergraduate, one William Henry Gates III. Gates, along with his childhood friend Paul Allen, promptly began working on a program that would make the Altair significantly more useful. They planned to create an implementation of the BASIC programming language to run on Altair machines that they hoped to sell directly to users. This plan was complicated by the fact that Gates and Allen, who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did not have access to the Altair, which was still being built in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They were, however, able to look up the 8080’s specifications, use a Harvard computer to build an 8080 simulator, and program the simulator. 229

This is not just a story about early-stage hustle. It’s also indicative of the nature of the computer industry’s growth. Software needs to run on hardware, but given enough processing power, a software program can simulate the hardware on which it’s expected to run. Gates and Allen had, as part of a previous venture, built an 8008 emulator on similar principles. Once they updated their emulator, they were able to begin building a new BASIC.

The pair had two precious resources at their disposal: free time and computer time. As the essayist and programmer Paul Graham has pointed out, Facebook and Microsoft were both founded not just by Harvard undergraduates but by Harvard undergraduates in January, during the school’s “reading period,” a time when students are, in theory, free to study for exams and, in practice, free to procrastinate. Harvard’s computing resources at the time included a powerful PDP-10, which Gates and Allen repurposed for their work. 230

Gates and Allen would, of course, go on to build one of the world’s dominant software companies. While Microsoft’s founding

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