History of Micosoft

1715 Words4 Pages

After reading the January 1, 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Bill Gates called the creators of the new microcomputer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system.[22] Gates had neither an interpreter nor an Altair system, yet in the eight weeks before the demo he and Allen developed the interpreter. The interpreter worked at the demo and MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC.[7] Gates left Harvard University, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where MITS was located, and founded Microsoft there. The name Microsoft, without the hyphen, was first used in a letter from Gates to Allen on November 29, 1975,[7] and on November 26, 1976 the name became a registered trademark.[22] The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan, entitled "ASCII Microsoft" (now called "Microsoft Japan").[22] On January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to a new home in Bellevue, Washington. [22] Steve Ballmer joined the company on June 11, 1980, and would later succeed Bill Gates as CEO.[22] The company restructured on June 25, 1981, to become an incorporated business in its home state of Washington (with a further change of its name to "Microsoft, Inc."). As part of the restructuring, Bill Gates became president of the company and Chairman of the Board, and Paul Allen became Executive Vice President.[22]

The first operating system the company publicly released was a variant of Unix in 1980. Acquired from AT&T through a distribution license, Microsoft dubbed it Xenix and hired Santa Cruz Operation in order to port/adapt the operating system to several platforms.[23][24] This U...

... middle of paper ...

...rosoft had not yet developed one. The success of the Internet caught them by surprise and they subsequently approached Spyglass to license their browser as Internet Explorer. Spyglass went on to later dispute the terms of the agreement, as Microsoft was to pay a royalty for every copy sold. However, Microsoft sold no copies of Internet Explorer, choosing instead to bundle it for free with the operating system.

Internet Explorer was first included in the Windows 95 Plus! Pack that was released in August 1995.[49] In September, the Chinese government chose Windows to be the operating system of choice in that country, and entered into an agreement with the Company to standardize a Chinese version of the operating system.[14] Microsoft also released the Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro joystick in an attempt to further expand its profile in the computer hardware market.[14]

Open Document