The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer.[1] The MS dialect is patterned on Digital Equipment Corporation's BASIC-PLUS on the PDP-11, which Gates had used in high school.[2] The first versions supported integer math only, but Monte Davidoff convinced them that floating-point arithmetic was possible, and wrote a library which became the Microsoft Binary Format.