However, the marketplace ate it up. QB was a lot "RADder" than TP, and it didn't take long for QB to eat TP's lunch. Borland fought back by coughing up "Turbo Basic" -- intended to be a QB-killer. Ah, but Gates out-Borlanded Borland! Shortly thereafter, MS delivered "Quick Pascal 1.0" -- a TP "near-clone", with almost identical syntax, more features, and a much nicer, easier to use UI.
Kahn got the message. Borland dropped TB, and MS dropped QP. QP 1.0 was the beginning and end of that dialect (and "Microsoft Pascal", a "full-price" compiler, faded into history too).
CP/M didn't come along for some time after MS's BASIC hit the streets, and, there were a variety of non-MS BASICs that were written for it. They all eventually failed, because they were by comparison crude, and lacked the support that MS could afford to deliver. I began with the TRS-80 dialect -- first tape, then the disc version; I remember how excited I was when they released the upgrade that recognized full variable names! Prior to that, only the first two letters of a variable name were recognized. "Total" and "Top" were both "To" as far as the interpreter was concerned -- and, they were both syntax errors too! ("To" was a reserved word.)
If there was any "language for the common man" that would have stood a chance for doing for "personal computing" what MS's BASIC did, it was Vulcan, AKA DbaseII. It would not have taken much to turn it into a general purpose programming language. If not for BASIC's ubiquity, I suspect Ratliff may have gone that route. In fact, after he sold off dBase, he started selling a new Vulcan -- a new, hopped-up version. I bought a copy, and upgraded it once, and while it's been so long that I don't remember much at all, I do seem to recall it having been beefed up into a fairly decent "close to general purpose" language.
Ah, memories...
(BTW if it seems that I am partial to Basic -- at least the modern dialects -- it's because I am. I not only cut my teeth on it, but, ended up seguing from my original career to become a software developer, and then, a "famous author" writing book and magazine articles on the language. MS Basic has been good to me.)
Anyway, I learned BASIC in high school in the mid '70s. They had a timeshared teletype machine that we wrote & ran our programs on. When the TRS-80 came out and I got one, I became so frustrated with BASIC's two-letter variable names, I started using assembler, because that language let you use a whole 6 letters! That was my introduction to a "real, adult" language. And sealed my career track as a software engineer. I even got to co-author a Windows book, too. (Who hasn't by now? :-)
This talk of Gates & Allen brings up a nagging question: Who's the genius who decided that we needed to use the silly backslash to separate directory names? I think that was a stupider decision than the infamous 640k memory limit.
OK, getting back (slightly) to the topic at hand: Wasn't there another company called SWTPC, in Texas IIRC, that came out with a 6800-based machine shortly after MITS came out with their Altair? I'm thinking that if the Altair had never seen the light of day, there was nevertheless a lot of ferment in the hobby/industry, and someone else would have been the first.