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◈ALB Atlas

Microsoft Alive

Microsoft
KindCompany
Founded1975
StatusAlive
FoundersGates & Allen
FieldSoftware
Sourcewww.microsoft.com ↗

A BASIC interpreter for the Altair became an empire — MS-DOS, Windows, Office, and now the cloud. The company the entire software industry once organized itself in relation to.

Created by Paul Allen Bill Gates
Created Xenix MS-DOS Windows (classic) OS/2 Windows NT / Windows Windows CE C# TypeScript
Notable people Dave Cutler Paul Allen Bill Gates Anders Hejlsberg

Gates and Allen wrote Altair BASIC on a Harvard PDP-10 in 1975 and licensed it to MITS — the founding transaction. The pivotal deal was IBM's PC in 1980: Microsoft bought QDOS for $50,000, licensed it to IBM as PC-DOS, and kept the right to sell it to clone makers.

Windows, Office, the browser wars, the antitrust case (settled 2001), then Nadella's pivot to Azure and open source — the company that was once 'the Evil Empire' now owns GitHub and contributes to Linux.

Sources

  1. microsoft.com/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft