1/ "Paul knew a lot more than I did about computer hardware, the machines themselves. 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."
2/ It was announcing that a young firm named Intel had released a microprocessor chip called the 8008. Paul and I realized this first microprocessor was very limited, but he was sure that the chips would get more powerful and computers on a chip would improve very rapidly."
3/ "Paul and I wondered what we could program the 8008 to do. He called up Intel to request a manual. We were a little surprised when they actually sent him one. We figured out a way to use the little chip to power a machine that could analyze traffic monitors on city streets..."
4/ "After I started at Harvard in 1973 Paul somehow managed to coax his clunky old Chrysler cross‑country from Washington State and took a job in Boston, programming mini‑computers at Honeywell. He drove to Cambridge a lot so we could continue our talks about future schemes..."
5/ "In the spring of 1974, Electronics magazine announced Intel’s 8080 chip...The 8080 was not much larger than the 8008, but it contained 2,700 more transistors. All at once we were looking at the heart of a real computer, and the price was under $200."
6/ "On an cold Massachusetts morning Paul and I were hanging out at the Harvard Square newsstand, and Paul picked up the January issue of Popular Electronics. This is the moment [that] gave reality to our dreams about the future." 
7/ "In 1975, when Paul and I naively decided to start a company, we were acting like characters in all those Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies who crowed, 'We’ll put on a show in the barn!' There was no time to waste. Our first project was to create BASIC for the computer."
8/ "Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months..." worldhistoryproject.org/1976/2/bill-ga…
9/ "The IBM cotract called for us to do work on the design of the machine and software. We didn't get paid that much--the total was something like $186K-but we knew there were going to be clones of the IBM PC. We structured that original contract to allow them." Bill Gates
10/ BG: "It was a key point in our negotiations.” PA: “We already had seen the clone phenomenon in the MITS Altair days. Other companies made machines that succeeded because they were similar to the Altair. It had been easy to modify our software so it worked on those machines."
11/ "People ask me to explain Microsoft's success. There's no simple answer and luck played a role but the most important element was our original vision. We thought we saw what lay beyond the Intel 8080 chip and then acted on it. We asked, 'What if computing were nearly free?'”
12/ "The real vision that was central to Microsoft came that year, in ‘71, as Paul Allen and I were talking about the microprocessor. We thought these new computers can be very, very cheap which means that they can be used by an individual, not just a company.” PA was 18; BG 16
