How Altair BASIC was written and got Bill Gates on the road to the billions.

Extract From Wikipedia:

Altair BASIC[edit]

Ed Roberts received a letter from Traf-O-Data asking if he would be interested in buying its BASIC programming language for the machine. He called the company and reached a private home, where no one had heard of anything like BASIC. In fact the letter had been sent by Bill Gates and Paul Allen from the Boston area, and they had no BASIC yet to offer. When they called Roberts to follow up on the letter he expressed his interest, and the two started work on their BASIC interpreter using a self-made simulator for the 8080 on a PDP-10 minicomputer. They figured they had 30 days before someone else beat them to the punch, and once they had a version working on the simulator, Allen flew to Albuquerque to deliver the program, Altair BASIC (aka MITS 4K BASIC), on a paper tape. The first time it was run, it displayed “READY”^[37] then Allen typed “PRINT 2+2” and it immediately printed the correct answer: “4”. The game Lunar Lander was entered in and this worked as well. Gates soon joined Allen and formed Microsoft, then spelled “Micro-Soft”.