Microsoft BASIC began in 1975 as the company's very first product: a BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8080, written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen for the Altair 8800. That codebase was soon adapted to run on other 8-bit CPUs, including the MOS 6502, Motorola 6800, and 6809. You can learn more about this time and hear directly from Bill Gates on the Microsoft Learn Website's History of Microsoft video series or by visiting Bill Gates' blog.
The 6502 port was completed in 1976 by Bill Gates and Ric Weiland. In 1977, Commodore licensed it for a flat fee of $25,000, a deal that placed Microsoft BASIC at the heart of Commodore's PET computers and, later, the VIC-20 and Commodore 64. That decision put Microsoft's BASIC at the heart of Commodore's machines and helped millions of new programmers learn by typing:
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
This is BASIC M6502 8K VER 1.1, the 6502 BASIC lineage that powered an era of home computing and formed the foundation of Commodore BASIC in the PET, VIC-20, and the legendary Commodore 64. This very source tree also contains adaptations for the Apple II ("Applesoft BASIC"), built from the same core BASIC source. The original headers still read, "BASIC M6502 8K VER 1.1 BY MICRO-SOFT"—a time capsule from 1978.
The version we are releasing here—labeled "1.1"—contains fixes to the garbage collector identified by Commodore and jointly implemented in 1978 by Commodore engineer John Feagans and Bill Gates, when Feagans traveled to Microsoft's Bellevue offices. This is the version that shipped as the PET's "BASIC V2." It even contains a playful Bill Gates Easter egg, hidden in the labels STORDO and STORD0, which Gates himself confirmed in 2010.
https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/03/microsoft-open-source-historic-6502-basic