Microsoft turns 50—and you can now download the OG code that started it all
Microsoft is officially turning the big 5-0 this year, and to celebrate, Bill Gates is spilling some wild origin stories — including how a bold little lie sparked the birth of one of the world’s biggest tech companies.
In a post on his Gates Notes blog, the Microsoft co-founder took a nostalgic trip back to 1975, back when he was a 19-year-old Harvard dropout (well, almost) and BASIC was the hottest thing in town. Gates even shared a photo of himself holding a massive stack of paper — the actual code that launched Microsoft.
The coolest code he ever wrote…that didn’t exist
According to Gates, it all started with a January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured the Altair 8800 on the cover — a primitive but groundbreaking personal computer made by a company called MITS.
Gates and his buddy Paul Allen, hyped by the idea of personal computing, called up MITS and told them they had already written a version of BASIC (a programming language) that worked on the Altair.
Except… they hadn’t. Not even close.
“There was just one problem,” Gates casually admitted. “We didn’t.”
Fake it, code it, ship it
What followed was two months of absolute chaos — Gates, Allen, and their friends coding day and night, turning the bluff into reality. Somehow, it worked. They pitched the working BASIC software to MITS, who ended up licensing it for the Altair 8800.
And just like that, Micro-Soft (yes, hyphen included) was born. The hyphen eventually got the boot, but the code? It became their first official product.
Yes, you can download it
To mark Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, Gates has made the original Altair BASIC code available for download. Half a century later, he still calls it "the coolest code I’ve ever written.”
“Programming has come a long way,” he wrote, “but I’m still super proud of how it turned out.”
From lying about having a product to building the most iconic software empire in history — honestly, it doesn’t get more startup-core than that.
