Ah yes, the hardware at our University was all that we had at that time too. Timesharing was too expensive and computer time was free (no written policy either or someone to ask what we were doing hanging around the computer center at 2 am.)
IMHO: I think Paul Allen was the genius who made it happen and Gates was a snake oil salesman who is still peddling his peanuts to the consumer.
re: “ I think Paul Allen was the genius who made it happen”
Gates could program too, to hear him talk about it AND looking at their history. The comments for MS BASIC also shows him and two others as authors.
You know that Paul and Bill go back to high school days?
https://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/606-bill-gates.html
In-depth interview (worthwhile):
https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm
School Experiences
DA: Were other of your contemporaries equally interested in the business, or did you find yourself unusual among the groups?
BG: Well, when I went to Lakeside School, I was about 12 years old. I started there in seventh grade. That was kind of a change for me. It is a private boys’ school. Very strict. At first I really didn’t like the environment. I did eventually find some friends there, some of who had the same sort of interest, like reading business magazines and Fortune. We were always creating funny company names and having people send us their product literature[laughs]. Trying to think about how business worked. And in particular, looking at computer companies and what was going on with them.
DA: What companies, in particular, did you like to follow?
BG: The first computer we used was a GE time-sharing system. It was connected over a phone line. Actually, the school couldn’t afford a full phone line, so someone in the offices had a switch where you could take over the phone line. It was an ASR-33 Teletype with paper tape connected up to a GE computer. But, very quickly, we found out about PDP-8s, and eventually got one loaned to us. And then eventually, Data General Nova got loaned to us. So, it these companies making smaller computers that were very fascinating to us. Joining all the user groups. DEC had one called the DECUS User Group. Getting on every mailing list. In Datamation they had these bingo cards where you could check everything you were interested in. So, we just put our name down and checked everything in there and tried to learn about the world of computing.
DA: How did the faculty respond to your interest outside of your curriculum compared to your interest in your own studies?
BG: Well, I was relieved from some classes, Math in particular, because I’d read ahead. So, I had quite a bit of free time. So, when the Mother’s Club which did this rummage sale, got the money for this Teletype and a certain amount of time to buy computer time, it was a question of who was going to figure this thing out? Now, I was very young. I was in eighth grade and some of the older students kind of barged in and thought they could figure it out. And very quickly, the teachers were intimidated. So, it was sort of a group of students reading the manuals and trying things out.
You would type the programs off-line on this yellow paper tape and then put it into the tape reader, dial up the computer, and very quickly feedin the paper tape and run your program. They charged you not only for the connect time, but also for storage units and CPU time. So, if you had a program that had a loop in it of some type you could spend a lot of money very quickly. And so we went through the money that the Mothers Club had given very rapidly. It was a little awkward for the teachers, because it was just students sitting there and zoom! — the money was gone.
I wrote a tic-tac-toe program and a couple of other base conversion programs. It was the BASIC language running on this GE system. So, people didn’t know what to think because teachers were fairly dignified in those days and usually were supposed to know what was going on. They were okay about it, but then when the money was gone, they had to start billing us for all of our usage. We had these kind of funny student checking accounts so my friends and I still stayed very active. We were kind of desperate to get free computer time one way or another.
The amount of time we’d spend in this particular room that had the Teletype was quite extreme. We sort of took over the room, myself and two other people. They called it the “Teletype Room”. We were always coming up with schemes to get free computer time, and eventually did with a local company. Convinced them that because they had a deal with DEC for this big computer, an early PDP-10, serial number 36, that if they could find problems with it they wouldn’t have to pay their rent. Having a few of the students, including me, bang on it and try to find bugs seemed like a good idea. And particularly, let us do that mostly at night. So, we were going down to this ... it was called Computer Center Corporation, C-Cubed, in the University District, staffed by some old people from the University of Washington Academic Computing Center had gone over there. So, for a few years that is where I spent my time. I’d skip out on athletics and go down to this computer center. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong. The teachers thought we were quite unusual. And pretty quickly there were four of us who got more addicted, more involved, and understood it better than the others. And those were myself, Paul Allen, who later founded Microsoft with me, Ric Weiland, who actually worked at Microsoft in the early days, and Kent Evans, who was my closest friend, and most my age, was killed in a mountain climbing accident when I was in 11th grade in high school. So, the four of us became the Lakeside Programming Group. We were the hard-core users.
More: https://harvardmagazine.com/2013/09/walter-isaacson-on-bill-gates-at-harvard
Because they did not have an Altair to work on, Allen had to emulate one on the PDP-10 mainframe at the Aiken Lab. So they bought a manual for the 8080 microprocessor and within weeks Allen had the simulator and other development tools ready.
Meanwhile, Gates was furiously writing the BASIC interpreter code on yellow legal pads. “I can still see him alternately pacing and rocking for long periods before jotting on a yellow legal pad, his fingers stained from a rainbow of felt-tip pens,” Allen recalled. “Once my simulator was in place and he was able to use the PDP-10, Bill moved to a terminal and peered at his legal pad as he rocked. Then he’d type a flurry of code with those strange hand positions of his, and repeat. He could go like that for hours at a stretch.”
One night they were having dinner at Currier House, sitting at the table with the other math geeks, and they began complaining about facing the tedious task of writing the floating-point math routines, which would give the program the ability to deal with both very small and very large numbers in scientific notation. A curly-haired kid from Milwaukee named Monte Davidoff piped up, “I’ve written those types of routines.” It was the benefit of being at Harvard. Gates and Allen began peppering him with questions about his capacity to handle floating-point code. Satisfied they knew what he was talking about, they brought him to Gates’s room and negotiated a fee of $400 for his work. He became the third member of the team, and would eventually earn a lot more.