> In 1975, Paul Allen flew out to Albuquerque to demonstrate the BASIC interpreter that he and Bill Gates had written for the Altair microcomputer. Because neither of them had a working Altair, Allen and Gates tested their interpreter using an emulator that they wrote and ran on Harvard’s computer system. The emulator was based on nothing more than the published specifications for the Intel 8080 processor. When Allen finally ran their interpreter on a real Altair—in front of the person he and Gates hoped would buy their software—he had no idea if it would work. But it did.
So, the real unsung heroes here are the Intel engineers who wrote a spec that was so exact that software running on an emulator written based just on the spec would also run without a hitch on the actual hardware?
In 1976 my first commercial programming job was converting a 8008 emulator written in Fortran to work on a Data General mini as an 8080 emulator, so another programmer writing 8080 firmware for a plotter could debug his code. The emulator source code originated with Intel as something called INTERP/8 8008, and I believe that's what Allen and Gates also used, as suggested in other online posts.
So, the real unsung heroes here are the Intel engineers who wrote a spec that was so exact that software running on an emulator written based just on the spec would also run without a hitch on the actual hardware?