Saved Altair 4K BASIC

< Absolutely. I agree 100%. If he had priced it in the range that a < hobbyist could afford, and proportionate to the cost of the system ($500 < for the kit?) then people would buy it. Its nothing to throw down $25 o < $50 if you're getting a manual and support with that. The KIT was $500, but that only got you the box and a CPU. Ram was expensive then and the IO was either serial, tape, or parallel so you also needed a TTY or CRT(I used CT1024). Still BASIC for MITS prices was ok but as Billy's price it was out of reach. FYI at the time of the article (early '75) a system with 32k of ram, cassette and serial IO would be over $3500! The 8800 was cheap, but not that cheap. Three years later (early 1978) that price would have dropped to 1500 or less due to the lower cost of memory boards and the lower cost of the system itself. The Disk system would be around late '76 early 77 with software to lag behind it. In 1977 you could get languages, for far less than $100 and many offered features that MSbasic did not have. Examples of this were PT basic, Focal and NS* disk BASIC. Also Tiny basic was published along with a little later LLL8k Basic as examples of free software with sources available. That trend nearly killed MS and did put a few others under. It was very hard to make a buck on paper tape or cassette based software. Affordable disk systems opened up the market and made it a serious force for applied software. Allison