Microsoft BASIC

Microsoft BASIC is the family of BASIC interpreters and compilers that formed the foundation product of the Microsoft company. It began in 1975 as Altair BASIC, the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft and the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer, written by Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10. Its dialect was patterned on the BASIC-PLUS of Digital Equipment Corporation, and Monte Davidoff supplied the floating-point library that became the Microsoft Binary Format. During the home computer boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Microsoft licensed it to many makers, so it was ported to machines built around the 8080, Z80, 6502 and 8086 processors, and variants such as Commodore BASIC, Atari Microsoft BASIC, BASICA and GW-BASIC appeared. The later release of Visual Basic revived its popularity.