Half a century ago, Microsoft’s future was written in code. It’s a nice excuse to take a trip back to the very early days of personal computing, and the extraordinary work of Bill Gates and the late Paul Allen.
A Software Vision is Born
An article in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine detailed the Altair 8800, a minicomputer running on a new Intel chip, and Bill Gates, a freshman at Harvard University at the time, and his high school friend Paul Allen took note. That’s when Gates and Allen reached out to the maker of the Altair, a company called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), with a classic line: They’d written software that would enable the new hardware. But at that time, the promised software didn’t exist.
More Than Two Months of Accelerated Development
With the deadline approaching for their promise, Gates and Allen toiled, at times almost sleep-deprived, for the next two months. They were experts in the BASIC computer language, which had developed at Dartmouth College in 1964. They had to Mold this to fit the architecture of the future Altair machine, for which they lacked even a prototype. Gates worked around the Henry Ford concept and wound up writing the code that would form the basis of Altair’s first operating system.
Bill Gates, in a recent anniversary blog post, called this original code “the coolest I’ve ever written,” and posted the program for download. This original code served as the foundation for a company that would transform personal computing forever. The subsequent suite of software applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the Windows operating system, became ubiquitous in homes and businesses around the globe. Recounting this momentous code in a video that accompanied the announcement, he said, “That was the revolution. That was what led to personal computing.”
To Be or Not to Be: Reflections from the Past Year
And so, with the 50th anniversary of this foundational code arriving in tandem with Bill Gates’ Oct. 28 entrance into his 70th year, it’s a moment that lends itself to reflection on the genesis of a technological age. Gates also released a memoir this year that touches on his childhood and the founding of the philanthropic foundation he began after stepping down as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000. After one would assume there would be an adjustment phase after Gates departed his position, Microsoft has more than doubled in size under the leadership of its current chief executive Satya Nadella, growing from valley of some $740 billion (€672 billion) at the time of Gates’s departure to a megalithic $2.8 trillion (€2.5 trillion) today. Gates also reflected on his fraught relationship with the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which marks its own 50th anniversary next year, in his memoir. Looking back on the journey, Gates, who has a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $108 billion (€98 billion), remarked, “50 years is a long time.”
