Altair MBL source

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: Altair MBL source
>   From: Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com>

>On Mon, 18 Apr 2005 rcini at optonline.net wrote:
>
>>   I was able to get binary copies of some Altair paper tapes but none of
>> them came with manuals. I believe that they can be loaded with the
>> Altair Multi-Boot Loader, which I do not have.
>
>Did you pay a license fee to Bill Gates?  If not, he might get very angry
>with you and post a long diatribe to the CC list about how software
>pirates are a hurting good software developers.
>
>"Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and
>deluge the hobby market with good software."*
>
>Hahahaha.

I laugh too.  Myself as one that did buy the first three offered versions 
of MITS BASIC at the discounted extortion of additional memory I'll say 
this.  It's 30 years later, I stull ahvent gotten a copy of MITS BASIC that 
wasn't buggy!  I'd add that among the users of the day everyone lusted 
for it and then got is to say "this is really poor" then go of and type in
a copy TBX, LLL-basic, or TDL 5k basic and there were more some distinctly 
better. Many of those were free, some cost money but, on the whole were 
cheap.  When I got my NS* Minidisk system it had basic with the DOS I 
figured it was just another crappy basic.  Turns out it was different 
than many but it worked, and worked well.  Those of us remember when DRI 
was OS and MS was languages.  Some of also remember that many of the MS
languages were just a expensive and always a little off from the base 
languages we knew from minis and the like.  So after all these years 
I'm not surprized nor disappointed.  It's what we expected would happen.


Allison