1/ One of the best ways to teach someone about business is to tell a story. One such story is how a prior business experience contributed to the success of Microsoft. Traf-O-Data was created in 1972 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to convert road volume data and into reports.
2/ Gates: "One summer day in 1972, when I was sixteen and Paul was nineteen, he showed me a ten paragraph article buried on page 143 of Electronics magazine [about Intel releasing the 8008 microprocessor.] We wondered what we could program the 8008 to do." amazon.com/Road-Ahead-Bil…
3/ Gates: “8008 wasn't capable of running a BASIC Interpreter. The 8008 is basically an 8-bit machine with no programmable stack. Doing this traffic analysis software was pushing the limits. Paul Gilbert knew how to do crazy wire wrapping.” americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates…
4/ Two years after they started to make the device “we had a working prototype machine (built on a $1,500 budget). Traf-O-Data was a good idea with a flawed business model. [Traf-O-Data's total net losses were ~$3,494]" recalled Paul Allen. newsweek.com/my-favorite-mi…
5/ “States began to provide traffic-counting services for free and our business model evaporated. While Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success." Paul Allen geekwire.com/2017/bill-gate…
6/ Gates: “By the time I went to Harvard [in the fall of 1973], the 8080 was just coming out, which was the first good general purpose microprocessor chip.” “We were walking through Harvard Square in December 1974 and saw Popular Electronics magazine.” news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
7/ "Traf-O-Data was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later. We taught ourselves to simulate how microprocessors work using DEC computers, so we could develop software even before our machine was built." archive.fortune.com/magazines/fort…
8/ Allen: “Bill and I had a big edge in speed and productivity with our Traf-O-Data development tools.” Anyone competing against Bill and Paul to create a version of BASIC that ran on the Altair PC needed a 8080 simulator.
BASIC for the Altair PC shipped in February of 1975.
9/ 25iQuiz: How did the effort of Bill Gates to create the hardware needed for the Traffic-O-Data computer as a 17 year old business founder impact his belief in the relative importance of software as expressed in his 1994 Playboy interview? thecorememory.com/The_Bill_Gates…
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