Discussion on the testing of Altair BASIC

My guess is that they used a real Altair 8800 to test it. The emulator would've been a tool to speed up development, but it couldn't replace testing on the actual hardware. From your link that appears to be what happened. They weren't sure it would work until they ran it on an actual Altair 8800. A comment in the source code, "FOR SIMULATOR FIXUPS", suggests that it was conditionally assembled according to whether it would be run on the emulator not, making the code for the emulator and the Altair different. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/…

As I said, the article you linked confirms my guess. They were only able to test whether it worked on an a Altair 8800 by taking to it MITS and running it on an Altair 8800. Their testing on the emulator only tested whether it worked on the emulator.

@RossRidge "My guess is that they used a real Altair 8800 to test it." Implies they had access to real hardware for testing. They didn't.

@RossRidge Yes you did. You said they were able to test the BASIC interpreter on real hardware. Perhaps you are not familiar with the software industry, but we normally test things before we sell them (although it sometimes doesn't seem that way). A sales demo is not testing.