The next day I and my nerdy friends raided the library. We found 101 Games in BASIC, a book with code for making versions of checkers, Battleship, and the like. It was our Necronomicon.

The 157-page PDF available to download on Gates’ blog contains the origins of Altair Basic — a programming language interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer — and “remains the ...