Hajra Naz
As Microsoft founder Bill Gates ages, he still recalls with fondness the pivotal computer code he wrote 50 years ago that transformed technology.
While the code, printed out on a teletype machine, may appear primitive compared to today’s advanced AI systems, it was essential in the creation of Microsoft in April 1975 — a milestone the company will celebrate this Friday.
In a blog post, Gates, now 69, reflects on how he and his late high school friend Paul Allen rushed to create the world’s first “software factory” after reading a 1975 Popular Electronics magazine article about the Altair 8800. The minicomputer, powered by a small Intel chip, sparked the idea for the two young innovators, who were just starting their college years at Harvard.
Inspired, Gates and Allen contacted Altair’s maker, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and promised CEO Ed Roberts that they had software ready to make the Altair functional. The catch? They hadn’t written the code yet.
Undeterred, the pair turned to the BASIC programming language, developed in 1964 at Dartmouth College. They still faced the challenge of adapting it to the yet-to-be-released Altair computer, even without a prototype.
After two months of hard work and little sleep, Gates completed the code that would become Altair’s first operating system. “That code remains the coolest I’ve ever written,” Gates wrote in his blog post, where the original program is available for download.
This code led to the foundation of a company that would change the course of personal computing. The software suite of Microsoft, comprising of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the Windows Operating System, has been, and continues to be, a major driver of sociatal upheaval Gates claimed in a video accompanying his blog.
“That was the revolution,” Gates asserted, “that was the thing that ushered in personal computing.”
Said statement sheds light on Gates’ retrospective of what is a monumental feat, as he seems to indulge in reminiscence a year in advance of his 70th birthday in October. The trip would also cover the publication of his memoir, where he chronicles his childhood, his adulthood often misread, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation he set up upon leaving Microsoft in 2000.
And as Gates started losing the “Microsoft” suffix in his life, the company encountered challenges, before triumphing under CEO Satya Nadella. Now, Microsoft sits at a valuation of 2.8 trillion dollars.
Alongside Gates, Microsoft also witnesses renewing talk around his complex past, now that he reflects on his nearly 108 billion dollar fortune, with the soon dubbed 50 years old Apple steered by its late co-founder Steve Jobs. Gates said:
“It’s crazy that the dream came true,”
