Story Highlights
- Historical event:
- 4 April 1975
- He came up with the idea that he and Paul Allen create a program that would carry out the BASIC commands on the new computer, the Altair 8800. He contacted the company that produced this computer, claiming to have such a program and that he wants to demonstrate it. In reality, he and Allen had neither the program nor the Altair computer.
On this day in 1975 the company Microsoft was founded, under its original name Micro-Soft (short for Microcomputer-Software).
The hyphen was left out six years later. The founders of the company were two childhood friends – Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
At the beginning of the year 1975, 19-year-old Gates, as a student at Harvard, read an article in a computer magazine in which the new Altair 8800 computer was described. He came up with the idea that he and Paul Allen could create a program that would carry out the BASIC commands on the new computer, the Altair 8800.
He contacted the company that produced this computer, claiming to have such a program and that he wants to demonstrate it. In reality, he and Allen had neither the program nor the Altair computer.
However, in 8 weeks they managed to make a demonstration program on the Altair 8800 emulator that Allen constructed. The demonstration went well and on this day the two of them founded the company in order to sell their software.
The name Micro-Soft was Allen’s idea. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to dedicate himself to his new job and he never completed his studies (as well as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who also left Harvard without finishing it).
