On a day like today, 47 years ago, two young entrepreneurs legally set up their business project in the context of the computer boom of the 1970s. the two young men were Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and in fact founded Microsoftone of the most important companies in the history of computer technology and technologies and at the same time one of the most influential companies in its development and advancement.

Today, it’s hard to believe that Gates and Allen were aware of how far the project they had just begun would go. His first commercial aspirations were undoubtedly much more modest, to the point that, despite creating Microsoft, they both kept their previous jobs for a while. However, this does not mean that they did not trust their project. Of these, Gates, who was studying at Harvard University at the time, packed his bags and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to start a business with the company that will be his first client.

The client Gates and Allen approached with Microsoft was MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), creators Altair 8800. This computer deserves a river of ink on its own, but suffice it to say that after playing on the cover of Popular Electronics, it became a spark that ignited a branch of the computer revolution. And Microsoft’s goal was to join this revolution, but not with hardware, as many others had done, but with software. It is not for nothing that his name was born from the contraction of MICROcomputer and SOFTware.

Microsoft and BASIC

Microsoft’s relationship to what has been the easiest programming language to learn for many years (unsurprisingly, the letter B in its name comes from beginners) and is that Microsoft’s design for MITS for the Altair 8800 was a version of this language for his Altair BASIC machine. Microsoft doesn’t think so, contrary to popular belief, in fact its origins date back to 1964, when it was created by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, but they were the first to see a great business opportunity.

Gates and Allen reached an agreement with MITS, knowing that Altair BASIC would be the first programming language for the Altair 8800, they founded Microsoft, which, after this success, began rapid growth, enabling them toopened its first international office just three years later, in 1978, in Japan. And his presence in the land of the rising sun had much in common with Microsoft’s new version of BASIC, which was responsible for operating the computers. MSX.

Paul Allen (left) and Bill Gates at Lakeside School, Seattle, Washington, in 1970, five years before Microsoft was founded.

Although at the time each computer belonged to “his father and his mother,” the advent of standards was imminent, Gates, Allen, and Steve Ballmer, who joined the team in 1980they knew how to see it, and they identified huge business potential in something that would be essential for the computers to come: the operating system, an area of ​​business that didn’t have to explain how important it was (and continues to be) to Microsoft throughout its history .

The rest is, of course, history.: the advent of IBM PC, MS-DOS, the first graphical interfaces with Windows, a leap into other areas of software with tables like a puppet (I know people who met Gates during personal presentations). »Of the advantages of tables), all with Microsoft, which, still led by a group of young people who at the right time saw the perfect opportunity, rose like a fire. Undoubtedly with lights and shadows, but it signs what no one can deny is a success story for those who do not see each other so often.

Today the metamorphosis that Microsoft has experienced is complete. At first it was a company of programming language interpreters, after operating systems, after applications, after services, after devices … and of course, as we remembered a few days ago, many projects fell aside, but in the end it is an honor to be given, when your battlefield is a space as dynamic as the space of technology.

With information from Wikipedia