How Bill Gates celebrates 50 years of Microsoft
Microsoft closes half a century and on the occasion of this event Bill Gates reveals to his personal blog the code that has changed technology forever – you can download him here.
« This code remains the most beautiful code I have written to date, » Gates says in his blog. « Even after so many years I still have fun when I see him. »
Credit: www.gatesnotes.com
Bill Gates: We were inspired by a magazine
Her story Microsoft He started in an article in a magazine, writes Gates.
We are in 1975. Popular Electronics magazine is released on the cover of the Altair 8800, a mini-computer operating with a tiny chip of the then unknown Intel.
Credit: www.gatesnotes.com
At that time personal computers were practically non -existent. Gates reads the article with his childhood friend Paul Allen.
Credit: www.gatesnotes.com
« Paul and I knew that the creation of software that would allow people to plan their Altair would revolutionize the way people interact with these machines, » he writes on his blog.
An innocent lie that changed the world
They immediately communicate with the manufacturer, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (Mits) to tell him that they had made their own version of the Basic programming language for the chip that operated by the Altair 8800.
Only there was a small problem: the code didn’t exist yet.
The two friends undertake to make the Basic language- developed in 1964 at Dartmouth College- compatible with Altair, even though they didn’t even have an Altair to work on the language.
They work at night to do the project.
And they do it: they complete the code that became the basis for the first Altair operating system.
This code laid the foundations for a business that would bring personal computers to every home. « This was the revolution, » Gates said in a video that accompanied his post.
This early success transformed Microsoft into the world’s first software factory, eventually launching the personal computers. From Word, Excel, PowerPoint and of course the Windows operating system, Microsoft will determine how millions of people interact with technology daily.
In the meantime, while Gates is now approaching 70, Microsoft has been launched at new heights under today’s CEO Satya Nadella. As the APB Live typically reports, Microsoft may have had difficulties in the Meta-Gates era, but today the company has a market value of about 2.8 trillion. Dollars – proving that the legacy of this « cool » code continues to resonate in the technology world five decades later.
Source: Ot.gr
