Bill Gates.
Bill Gates felt a range of emotions ahead of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary.
In a blog post published two days before the actual milestone on Friday, April 4, the billionaire philanthropist — who co-founded the company in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen — said he was “excited” to celebrate, but admitted that “reaching this milestone feels bittersweet.”
“I always love reflecting back on Microsoft’s history and dreaming about its future,” he wrote. “But it’s also hard to believe that such a significant piece of my life has been around for a half-century.”
For Gates, 69, who has spent a lot of time reflecting on the early years of his life for his memoir Source Code, which came out in February, it’s easy to remember the company’s beginnings.
Before Microsoft was even Micro-Soft (yes, that’s a thing), Gates and Allen, who died in 2018, shared a love of computers.
“The story of how Microsoft came to be begins with, of all things, a magazine,” Gates wrote in his blog post. The cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Mechanics featured a photo of an Altair 8800, which Gates described as a “groundbreaking personal computer kit that promised to bring computer power to hobbyists”
“When Paul and I saw that cover,” Gates continued, “we knew two things: the PC revolution was imminent, and we wanted to get in on the ground floor.”
The two friends knew that software would be the key to shaping how people interacted with computers, so they reached out to the company behind the Altair 8800 and told them they already had a version of BASIC – a programming language that’s easy for even beginners to use – that would work for the machine.
The only problem? They hadn’t actually built that software just yet — but after “lots of sleepless nights,” they did. And that software, which is made out of code, became Microsoft’s first product.
And in honor of the milestone anniversary, Gates shared a link to download that original source code.
“Computer programming has come a long way,” he added, “but I’m still super proud of how it turned out.”
