DKA: Bill, let's talk a little bit about the people that formed the early Microsoft.
BG: Paul and I were the founders. During the time we were in Albuquerque, which
was 1975 to 1978, we ended up with about sixteen people. This is a picture we took
towards the end of that time [Bill refers to the group photo taken in Albuquerque],
myself and Paul. This is Gordon Letwin, who had worked and did the Heath BASIC,
Benton/Harver BASIC. Then he was upset when they were licensing my BASIC. So,
he came to work for us and did some incredible work. Marc McDonald was actually
our first employee. Other than Andrea, who wrote the manuals, and Marla, who
helped keep the books.
I was the Sales Department, Contract Department. Everybody else here were
programmers. We all wrote an immense amount of code. These were exciting years.
The number of new machines coming out were pretty dramatic.
Our offices were here in fancy Albuquerque, up on the eighth floor of this building
here. Albuquerque was great. There weren't many distractions there, but it was hard
to recruit people as we tried to grow.
DKA: What was the culture of the company like?
BG: Well, I would program sort of night and day, and tell people, "Hey, we
promised this thing to be done in a few months we've got to get these things done."
We were so aggressive at just getting things done. Like committing to write a ROM
BASIC that would fit into 12K of ROM. It was fun because, I at that time, got to
look over all the code that people did, and talk to people about where we would go
with things. It was just a very small group, and yet between the new machines being
done in Japan and the U.S., every week something new was happening.
DKA: Did the other people share your intention? Were they there as many hours as
you were?
BG: Well, certainly most of the people did. And we were all quite young. I may
have set the most extreme example. But, the work was really fun. We always had
deadlines that we ended up committing to that ended up being very challenging.
A great example of that was the work that we did on this TRS-80. The Altair BASIC
comes out in 1975. In the next big wave is a set of three machines that came out in
1977. The TRS-80, the Apple II that we have over here that came out, actually,
without the disks at first, and a machine called the Commodore PET. And those were
low-cost and yet, they weren't kits or anything. They came out prepackaged. And
they looked like they would really ignite the volume in the market. And all three of
them went out and did very well.