Paul Allen, as soon as he sees the new issue of Popular Electronics, with the Altair 8800 on the cover, is excited and curious. He buys it for 75 cents and rushes to bring it to his high school friend Bill Gates’s Harvard dorm. Bill, unlike Paul, has never cared much about hardware. For Bill, the magic is the software. When he sees that cover, he’s convinced he must create software for personal computers and make hardware a commodity. It will be the best idea of his life.
