This week, Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary (officially, it’ll be on April 4). We’ve had a lot of fun at Windows Central recapping some of the best and worst moments alongside missed opportunities, strategic mistakes, and more across Microsoft’s ecosystem.
And the fun isn’t over yet! To commemorate the special occasion, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates has joined the fray and shared the source code that shaped the company’s origins — Altair BASIC. According to the philanthropic billionaire via his Gates Notes blog:
“Before there was Office or Windows 95 or Xbox or AI, there was Altair BASIC. In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home.”
“Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new ways to make life easier and work more productive. 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 has written plenty of code for the company, which has partly contributed to its success in software development, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth trillions of dollars. However, he fondly marks Altair BASIC as “the coolest code I’ve ever written.”
While remembering a Kodak moment of holding a foot-long piece of paper featuring the code, Gates indicated that Altair BASIC was inspired by the January 1975 copy of “Popular Electronics” magazine.
It featured a cover photo of the Altair 8800 microcomputer designed by MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), which inspired Gates to dabble in computer programming and software development.
Gates and his co-founder, Paul Allen, reached out to the company to pitch an interpreter of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800.
The software would allow more users to easily create their own programs. Gates and Allen spent sleepless nights for months on end trying to develop the code that they claimed already existed, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Altair BASIC was the first product Gates and Allen developed under the new company. At the time, they called it Micro-Soft. “We later dropped the hyphen,” added Gates. Sharing this legendary source code is a fascinating move, while Thurrott calls it “the most Bill Gates way possible” to celebrate Microsoft’s anniversary, and I couldn’t agree more.
You could print out all 157 pages of the source code for yourself, if you’d really like to, but it’s not the most exciting read for a casual audience.
