David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…They don't control their destiny. People aren't paying MITS for the BASIC. They're "pirating" the software. They can't do deals with all the other computer companies that want to come licensed directly, so things get a little tight. Microsoft ends up winning the arbitration, I believe, in maybe November 1977, meaning they are now totally free to license BASIC to anybody who wants to buy it on any terms that they want. They turn around. They immediately license it to Trinity, Apple, Commodore, Radio Shack, and Tandy. They license it to all the big companies, the GEs, the NCRs, who want to experiment with microcomputers. There's a really funny story with Apple that apparently, Woz had more or less written 95% of their own BASIC. But it didn't have floating point numbers, it only had integer numbers. Jobs is totally writing Woz. He's like, the BASIC is really important. Can you just finish it? Can you do floating point? Woz just doesn't do it, so Jobs has to go license Microsoft's BASIC. Amazing. That's the first deal that happens between the companies. There's so many deals done, both directions, commercial deals, equity deals, legal disputes in both directions. This is the very first time that they do something together.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.