Bill Gates publishes the original source code of Microsoft that started it all | Technology News

As Microsoft marks its 50th anniversary, Bill Gates is sharing a piece of software hory — the original source code that started it all.
In a post published on his Gates Notes blog on Wednesday, April 2, the Microsoft co-founder announced that he was making “the coolest code” he’s ever written free to download anyone.
“Making it 50 years is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn’t have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella—along with the many people who have worked at Microsoft over the years,” Gates wrote.
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Calling the 50-year milestone “bittersweet”, Gates reminisced: “It feels like just yesterday that Paul [Allen] and I were hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard’s computer lab writing the code that would become the first product of our company.”
The blog post also contains several iconic photographs of the early days of the company.
Before Microsoft, there was Micro-Soft
Shedding light on how Microsoft came to be, Gates wrote that it began with the January 1975 copy of Popular Electronics magazine, which featured a cover photo of a personal computer known as the Altair 8800 that had been created a small company called MITs.
The 19-year-old Gates and his Harvard University friend Paul Allen reached out to the Altair’s creators and told them they had a version of the programming language BASIC for the chip that the Altair 8800 ran on.Story continues below this ad
There was just one problem, they didn’t actually have any such software. “It was time to get to work,” Gates wrote.

He and his friends coded day and night for two months to create the software they had said already exed. And the rest, as they say, is tech hory.
“Altair BASIC became the first product of our new company, which we decided to call Micro-Soft,” Gates wrote. “We later dropped the hyphen,” he added.
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