

We didn’t have the Intel 8080 chip that the Altair computer ran on, So Paul got to work writing a program that would simulate one on Harvard’s PDP-10 mainframe. This allowed us to test our software without needing an actual Altair.
So, basically:
We are going to write a compiler, but first we are going to write a Virtual Machine from scratch because the hardware is too expensive.
Good times.
Inflation doesn’t mean everything increases prices uniformly. Desktop PCs, for example, were more expensive in absolute value in the 1980s, and the average desktop would cost more than $4000 if they had kept with inflation.