Bill Gates celebrates Microsoft's 50th anniversary by recalling the time he created 'Microsoft's first product'
by
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Microsoft's founding on April 4, 2025, Microsoft founder Bill Gates reminisced in his blog about the creation of 'Microsoft's first product.'
Celebrating 50 years of Microsoft | Bill Gates
https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code
In January 1975, shortly before Microsoft was founded, the American electronics magazine Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 personal computer on its cover. At the time, the concept of 'individuals owning computers' was not yet common, but when Gates and Paul Allen saw this, they thought 'the PC revolution is happening rapidly,' and tried to ride that wave.
So Gates and Allen contacted Ed Roberts , founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) , the company that developed the Altair 8800, and offered him a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 chip.
By
BASIC is a programming language developed in 1964. It is easy to learn even for people with little computer experience, and was widely used because it allowed people to write software code relatively easily. In fact, it seems that the first programming language that Gates and Allen learned was BASIC, but BASIC had a problem in that 'computers themselves cannot understand BASIC.' More complex languages are used inside computers, and an interpreter is needed to act as a bridge between BASIC and the computer and execute the code.
Gates and Allen were pitching an interpreter that would run code written in BASIC on the Altair 8800. The problem was that when they made their pitch to MITS, they had not yet developed a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800.
The two promised to show Roberts a demo in March of that year, but at that time they did not have an Intel 8080 processor, the same processor used in the Altair 8800. So Allen wrote the code to simulate the Altair 8800 on a PDP-10 mainframe in the Harvard University laboratory, and Gates wrote the main code. Gates asked his classmate Monty Davidoff to write the floating-point arithmetic routines.
by
Another obstacle to developing a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 was that computer memory was very expensive at the time, and the Altair 8800 couldn't be equipped with additional memory. In order to fit all the code into the BASIC interpreter's four kilobytes, Gates used a variety of techniques and optimizations, including compacting data structures and streamlining algorithms. 'It was a fun challenge,' Gates recalls, but it was stressful nonetheless.
After about two months of development work, day and night, they finally completed the code that they had been saying existed but didn't actually exist. They named the code ' Altair BASIC ' and after a demonstration in front of Roberts was a great success, they decided to distribute it. Although the company name was not yet Microsoft at the time, this was Microsoft's first product.
Paul wrote the final code for Altair BASIC on a flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where MITS is headquartered. The details of this are written in Gates' memoir, ' Source Code: My Beginnings, ' which was released on Tuesday, February 4, 2025.
The source code for Microsoft's first product, Altair BASIC, can be downloaded as a PDF file by clicking DOWNLOAD at the bottom of the blog.
In addition, technology media The Verge also considers why Microsoft has survived for 50 years on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.
How Microsoft made it through 50 years | The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/643246/microsoft-50-business-model-cloud-ai
Microsoft has had a number of failures in the past, including the rollout of mobile devices and Windows 8, which have caused it to lose a lot of money, but The Verge says that for Microsoft, 'a serious challenge to do something new' was crucial. In an interview with The Verge, Steven Batish, head of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, said, 'We're still here and leading the way because we embrace change. This is the essence of Microsoft, and it's unique for a company like us that's old in a rapidly changing industry.'
There are also cases where various failures have been useful in subsequent products. For example, the voice assistant Cortana and Windows Phone were major failures, but the technology cultivated in these products was useful for the early AI experiences in Surface Pro X and Windows.
Related Posts:
in Note, Posted by log1h_ik