Steve Jobs was still running Apple Computer from his father's garage in Los Altos, Calif., in 1976 when he got his first call from Microsoft--offering to sell him a version of the BASIC computer language for the prototype Apple I. No thanks, Jobs said. His pal Steve Wozniak had already written a BASIC, and if they needed a better one, they could do it themselves over the weekend.
It was typical Jobs: quick, dismissive and at least half wrong. Jobs ended up licensing Microsoft's BASIC after all (on terms that turned out to be, as usual, very advantageous to Apple). And...