On January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to a new home in Bellevue, Washington, since it was hard to recruit top programmers to Albuquerque. The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan, entitled " ASCII Microsoft" (now called " Microsoft Japan"), and on November 29, 1979, the term, "Microsoft" was first used by Bill Gates. Hyphenated in its early incarnations, on November 26, 1976, the company was registered under that name with the Secretary of State of New Mexico. Revenues of the company totalled $16,005 by the end of 1976.Īllen came up with the original name of Micro-Soft, a portmanteau of microcomputer and software. Allen moved to Albuquerque, Gates soon quit Harvard to join him, and they co-founded Microsoft there. When Allen flew to Albuquerque to meet with MITS, the interpreter worked and MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC. Allen and Gates had neither an interpreter nor an Altair system, yet in the eight weeks before the demo, they developed an interpreter with the help of Monte Davidoff. Gates called Altair manufacturer Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), offering to demonstrate the implementation.
They saw potential to develop an implementation of BASIC for the system. Allen bought the magazine and rushed to Currier House at Harvard College, where he showed it to high school friend Bill Gates. In late 1974, Paul Allen, a programmer at Honeywell, was walking through Harvard Square when he saw the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, the first microcomputer. Īltair 8800 computer with the popular Model 33 ASR Teletype as terminal, paper tape reader, and paper tape punch.
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It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. When Microsoft launched several versions of Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, they had captured over 90% market share of the world's personal computers.Īs of June 30, 2015, Microsoft has a global annual revenue of US$86.83 Billion and 128,076 employees worldwide. Microsoft Windows eventually overshadowed OS/2 in terms of sales. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2. In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. In 1980, Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM to bundle Microsoft's operating system with IBM computers with that deal, IBM paid Microsoft a royalty for every sale. Its current best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software Xbox, a line of entertainment of games, music, and video Bing, a line of search engines and Microsoft Azure, a cloud services platform. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation.