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.They believed it was a huge company taking over the computer world.But MITS wasn’t very impressive to Allen.When he first landed at the airport, he was met by Roberts, a big, lumbering fellow who didn’t seem at all like the president of a fast-moving high-tech firm.(To be fair, Roberts was underwhelmed equally by Allen, who was a kid just out of school, when he thought he was meeting an executive from a serious software company.) When they arrived at MITS’ offices, Allen was disappointed even more.MITS wasn’t some elegant enterprise in cool, sleek office space.MITS was in cramped quarters in a storefront office next to a massage parlor in a decrepit strip mall.Hardly the sort of place for the center of computer breakthroughs, Allen thought.Still, he was there to catch a ride on this wave of Altairs that was sweeping at least some parts of the country.As soon as they stepped inside, Roberts showed Allen the Altair.But it wasn’t ready to go.Workers were still testing the new memory boards to make sure the machine was capable of trying out something like BASIC.Allen would have to wait until the next morning to try BASIC.The next morning came, no doubt following a fitful night of sleep at a hotel Allen couldn’t even pay for.(“He didn’t have enough room on his credit card,” recalls Roberts, who picked up the tab.“He still owes me money.”) During a nerve-racking five minutes, Allen flicked the switches over and over again using the loader code he’d written on the plane.Roberts and other MITS32THE ACCIDENTAL ZILLIONAIREcolleagues stood around, chuckling.This amateur style, they thought, could only mean they had a dud on their hands, like many of the other BASIC demonstrations they’d had.But this time, BASIC worked.Allen was as shocked as the rest of them when the machine sprang into action.It sent out the okay prompt; Allen responded by telling it to PRINT 2 + 2, then began a game of Lunar Lander with the machine.Everyone was impressed; Roberts gave Allen a deal on the spot.“Come work for us,” he said.Allen accepted and phoned Gates right away.“It worked!” he cried.They celebrated when Allen returned to Boston.Allen appeared to like working at MITS.The people were nice, but more importantly, MITS was just about the center of the universe in computers at the time.As director of software, Allen was in charge of his own new division at MITS.He was finally working on the cutting edge.Allen stayed in Albuquerque.Even while he continued to work on his company with Gates, he was becoming part of the MITS team.He really hit it off with his rough-edged boss and was liked by the rest of the staff.Roberts was a burly, gruff fellow.He was as tough as Gates, but less whiny and anxious.He liked to talk, but he didn’t like to be disobeyed or contradicted.He demanded his employees tow the line.At one company meeting, he was particularly irked by the fact that some people had shown up late.“Next time we have this meeting,” one former employee recalls he said, “We’re going to reduce the staff by the number of people who are late!”But Allen liked Roberts and it was mutual.The two were men with wide-ranging interests.They talked for hours on a range of subjects.Gates, on the other hand, knocked heads with Roberts more than a few times.Because former employees thought thatMAKING MICROSOFT33Gates could win, they’d send him in to do battle.It didn’t endear him to Roberts at all.“Paul was, as far as I was concerned, our software guy.Gates was just a programmer—he’d probably take umbrage at that,” says Roberts.“Paul was much more important to MITS, because Gates was hard to deal with.He assumed everyone was stupid, but Paul would listen to what was being said.He realized you needed hardware to run software and vice versa.Paul was a major factor at MITS.He was one of our major assets.He was probably involved to some extent in almost everything we did, because you had to integrate software and hardware.”Allen wasn’t always punctual himself, but he was hard working.He also was somewhat of a hardware junkie, as Roberts said.At MITS, he created a circuit board that plugged in to the Altair so that an attached monitor could display lower-case type as well as upper case.Also for MITS, he set up a software applications center in Atlanta, which would distribute any programs developed by MITS or MITS customers who needed distribution.Allen also worked alongside other hardware teams on monitors, assemblers, and program editors.“He was one of the guys,” says David Bunnell, the company’s technical writer who went on to launch tech magazine PC Week.Not that Allen was shirking his responsibilities to his business partner.By day a software director, Allen spent his nights working on his company with Gates.In 1975, Gates came out to Albuquerque during the summer and occasionally took semesters off from Harvard.Micro-Soft—as it was called then—had basically set up shop inside the Sundowner Motel, a dumpy motel across from MITS’ offices.Later, it was moved to Allen and Gates’s two-bedroom apartment and their small company worked from there [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]