Microsoft: A Revolution Which Began On 4 April!

The year was 1975. The day was Today, 4 April. At a time when most people didn’t know what computers were, two young men, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, decided to make history. Allen used to work as a programmer while Gates was still in college at Oxford. However, when the idea of Microsoft or Micro-Soft, as it was called then; came to be, they realised conventional life wouldn’t get them anywhere.

The inspiration of Microsoft as a company came to be when Paul Allen read an article about the Altair 8800 micro computer in the Popular Electronics magazine. Gates approached MITS (the makers of the Altair) and offered his and Allen’s services to write a new version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair. In eight weeks, Allen and Gates were able to demonstrate their program to MITS, who agreed to distribute and market the product under the name of Altair BASIC.

From then onwards, there no stopping the two of them. Microsoft’s first successful program that was publicly released was a new version of Unix called the Xenix. Released in the year 1980, Xenix later became the founding platform for Microsoft’s word processor called Multi Tool Word. This later became what is now known as Microsoft Word. In what was known as the deal of the century, Bill Gates earned sole licensing rights to MS-DOS for IBM. This was the first time Microsoft broke ground and came to be one of the largest software companies.

The very first Microsoft Mouse was launched on 2 May, with Microsoft’s crowning glory, Microsoft Windows, being launched in 1983. In 1986, the company went public and Bill Gates became the youngest ever billionaire. In August 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95. In 2001, the first XBox was launched. In 2005, Microsoft changed gaming forever by launching the XBox 360. In the year 2012, Microsoft made their first foray into the computing hardware market with the announcement of Surface tablets that ran Windows RT and Windows 8 Pro.

Microsoft grew from being a small startup in a garage to one of the wealthiest software companies in the world in a mere 43 years. With Windows being what it is today, none of this would have been possible had Bill Gates and Paul Allen been the conventional people they were expected to be!