Microsoft Bill Gates Paul Allen

Fact Microsoft #1: Who took an airplane flight to install Microsoft's BASIC on the Altair computer at MITS.

1. Bill Gates: "So we created this BASIC interpreter. Paul took the paper tape er, and - and flew out. In fact, the night before, he - he got some sleep while I double checked everything to make sure that we had er, had it all right." - PBS Triumph of the Nerds, transcript

2. Paul Allen:
   "The night before my departure, after I knocked off for a few hours of sleep, Bill stayed up with the 8080 manual and triple- checked my macros. He was bleary- eyed the next morning when I stopped by en route to Logan Airport to pick up the fresh paper tape he’d punched out. The byte codes were correct, Bill said. As far as he could tell, my work was error free. The flight was uneventful up until the plane’s final descent, when it hit me that we’d forgotten something: a bootstrap loader, the small sequence of instructions to tell the Altair how to read the BASIC interpreter and then stick it into memory. A loader was a necessity for microprocessors in the pre-ROM era. Without one, that yellow tape in my briefcase would be worthless. I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it at Aiken, where I could have coded it without rushing and simulated and debugged it on the PDP- 10. Now time was short. Minutes before landing, I grabbed a steno pad and began scribbling the loader code in machine language— no labels, no symbols, just a series of three- digit numbers in octal (base 8), the lingua franca for Intel’s chips."
   Allen's book "Idea Man", 2011, Page 78.

3. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/09/dawn-of-a-revolution/