Bill Gates and Paul Allen create a company called Micro-Soft. It will grow into one of the largest U.S. corporations and place them among the world’s richest people.
Gates and Allen had been buddies and fellow BASIC programmers at Lakeside School in Seattle. Allen graduated before Gates and enrolled at Washington State University. They built a computer based on an Intel 8008 chip and used it to analyze traffic data for the Washington state highway department, doing business as Traf-O-Data.
Allen went to work for Honeywell in Boston, and Gates enrolled at Harvard. News in late 1974 of the first personal computer kit, the Altair 8800 (see here), excited them, but they knew they could improve its performance with the computer language BASIC (see here). Allen spoke to Altair manufacturer Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems and sold the firm on the idea. Gates and Allen worked night and day to complete the first microcomputer BASIC. Allen moved to Albuquerque in January 1975 to become director of software for MITS. Gates dropped out of his sophomore year at Harvard and joined Allen in New Mexico.
Allen was twenty-two; Gates was nineteen. Altair BASIC was functioning by March. The “Micro-Soft” partnership was sealed in April but didn’t get its name for a few more months. The fledgling company also created versions of BASIC for the hot-selling Apple II and Radio Shack’s TRS-80.
Microsoft moved to Washington state in 1979. It incorporated in 1981, a few weeks before IBM introduced its personal computer with Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS 1.0.
Microsoft stock went public in March 1986. Adjusting for splits, a share of that stock was worth about 320 times its original value twenty-five years later.—RA