Microsoft turns 50: How two school friends ‘put a computer in every home’
Microsoft has a big birthday today after being with us for half a century.
The tech giant was founded in 1975, so you might want to open up Office for your best WordArt to make a card for its 50th anniversary.
Tied to the beginnings of the digital age, the company is now closer to pension age than its first legal pint, which could make you feel quite old if you remember dial-up internet and floppy disks.
From the highs of a (brief) $3,000,000,000,000 valuation to the lows of crashing IT infrastructure worldwide last summer, the company still has a huge influence on our lives.
Chances are you’ll interact with Microsoft somehow today, whether that’s emailing someone on Outlook, joining a meeting on Teams, or using Windows as your whole operating system.
How Microsoft was founded
In a blog post on Wednesday, Bill Gates reflected on how reaching this milestone is ‘bittersweet’, because it is hard to believe it has been half a century since they began their company when it ‘feels like yesterday’.
He and his co-founder, who died in 2018, first met at Lakeside school in Seattle as teenagers who bonded over their love of computer programming.
They launched Microsoft only a few years later, when Gates was 19 and Allen was 22.
Inspiration came from a ‘Popular Electronics’ magazine cover with a photo of a personal computer that could be used at home, when they realised there would be demand for software tailored to it.
In a prime example of ‘fake it til you make it’, Gates told how he approached the computing company to say he had a programming language which would run on it.
‘There was just one problem: We didn’t,’ he wrote. ‘It was time to get to work.’
He shared a link for people to download the original Microsoft source code which they did manage to finish in time – though at the time, it was called Micro-Soft (standing for microprocessors and software), as they hadn’t dropped the hyphen yet.
Gates told how early on, he and Allen set the goal of ‘a computer on every desk and in every home’.
The future of Microsoft
Microsoft is now one of the big four tech companies, vying with Apple, Alphabet and Amazon for market share.
While there isn’t a computer in literally every home, this vision of the world isn’t far from reality, with smartphones commonplace and vastly more powerful machines than the kind of computers he was thinking about back then.
The experience of using Windows now is vastly different than for its users before the millenium, but there are a few apps that have gone the distance since it first launched in 1985.
Five desktop apps have survived the chopping block since the release of Windows 1.0 until the present day.
Calculator, Paint, Notepad, Clock, and Control Panel are all stil around, so for a nostalgia fix you could open up the clock and see what the time is.
Reminsicing on some the programmes that weren’t so longlived, Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive officer at Microsoft AI: ‘Like for so many, my first memories of using a computer are inextricably tied to Microsoft.
‘From Encarta to Internet Explorer, I’ll never forget how it magically opened my world. Everything was suddenly at my fingertips.’
He said that today, the company is ‘dedicated to doing this for a new generation, using AI to explore knowledge, fire our creativity, deepen our connections, offload the burden and bring a sense of calm and clarity to our overloaded minds.
‘Microsoft has consistently re-invented itself and built new eras of technology; now we couldn’t be more excited to do it again.’
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