David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's funny. In many ways, at this point in history, getting a manual was actually much more valuable than getting the processor itself because the processor would arrive. Unless there was documentation, you would have no idea how to interact with it to take advantage of its power. If you had a manual, sure, you couldn't actually test the stuff you wrote for it on the hardware. But if you wrote an emulator on a bigger, more powerful computer that could mimic the computer that you're actually targeting, you could go years before actually ever running the software on the target device and just work off of what the manual says as long as the manual is correct and matches how it actually works. And this is going to become very important to Microsoft in just a second. Traffic data is not a huge success. I think I read a few places, they make about $20,000 in revenue from it. Again, great money for high school and college kids, but not world-changing stuff here. This is not what Bill aspires to for the company he's going to start. Bill and Paul are getting experience with the microprocessor. Bill actually has the idea for Microsoft when they're working with it. He's like, oh, this is a computer, why don't I go off and write an interpreter for BASIC here, and we can sell the BASIC interpreter for the microprocessor and build a big business? The AD08 just wasn't powerful enough yet to do that. But spoiler alert, that totally becomes Microsoft. The seeds of Microsoft are selling language interpreters for new processors, new hardware, new computers that enable you to write familiar programming languages on that new hardware.…

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