Bill Gates: Co-Founder of Microsoft & Co-Developer of the Altair BASIC Language (2024)

Following up on the last post, “Jeff Bezos: Abracadabra, The Internet’s First Online Book Store,” today’s LinkedIn newsletter will explore one aspect of the life of Bill Gates (born William H. Gates, III), who in 1975 founded the company then known as Micro-Soft, a combination of the words “microcomputer” and “software,” with childhood friend, Paul Allen. The two would later write the Altair BASIC programming language and licensed its use to Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System (MITS), makers of the Altair 8800.

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Bill Gates was born William H. Gates, III in Seattle, Washington. He’s the middle child of three born to Bill Gates, Sr. and Mary Gates. Growing up, his childhood nickname was “Trey”, possibly in reference to him being the third William H. Gates in the family and likely from card playing where “trey” stands for three, and “deuce” for two.

In 1967, he would attend Lakeside School, where he met Paul Allen who was a member at a club he’d formed, called the Lakeside Programmers Group. The two would become friends and business partners.

He wrote his first computer program, a tic-tac-toe game, at the age of 13 using the programming language BASIC.

At Lakeside, he worked on an ASR-33 (Automatic Send Receive) teletype computer terminal, which looked like a heavy-duty terminal. It required being connected to a computer and printed at a speed of 10 letters per second. The cost for which was about $1,400 at the time. During their junior year at Lakeside, he and Paul Allen created a program for scheduling classes.

In 1972, they created the Traf-O-Data to measure traffic in the streets and kept track of how many cars used a road. He would then head off to Harvard University in the fall of 1973 with the intention of becoming a lawyer or mathematician.

How did they come to write the Altair BASIC language? The Altair 8800 was manufactured by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System (MITS). The two read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics which carried the headline “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models—Altair 8800—Save Over $1,0000.” It was introduced as the first computer for the home market, and arrived as a kit that users had to put together, came with limited memory, lack a screen and keyboard

They formed Micro-Soft that same year with the goal of putting a personal computer on every desk and in every home.

Paul Allen contacted MITS, claiming that they had a version of the BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) computer language that would run on the Altair 8800. Bill Gates ended up writing most of the code for the BASIC program, which did a variety of simple math calculations. Allen flew to Mexico to demo the Altair BASIC to MITS, the first time he’d seen an Altair 8800 outside of the pages of Popular Electronics. He ran the program for Ed Roberts, head of MITS, and it worked. It was Microsoft’s first product.

They worked out a contract to provide software programming services. Paul Allen moved to Mexico and was hired by MITS as Director of Software Development. The hyphen in Micro-Soft, a combination of the words “microcomputer” and “software,” was dropped in 1979 and the company relocated to the Seattle area.

Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year. Microsoft developed additional programming languages and received its first lawsuit in 1977 with MITS over ownership rights to their version of BASIC.

In late 1980, IBM came to Microsoft and asked Gates to provide an operating system. Microsoft purchased an operating system called 86-QDOS (Quick & Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000, changed the name of the program to MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) and licensed it to IBM. Each time a computer with MS-DOS was sold, Microsoft earned money.

By the end of 1982, the company had doubled in size, earning $34 million with over 200 employees.

In 1983, the company introduced Microsoft Word, and announced it would release a graphic user interface (GUI) for PCs. With the graphic interface, the computer user clicks on pictures and systems versus having to type specific commands into the system.

Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 to criticism that it was an imitation of Mac’s OS—Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the early 1980s. Windows 2.0 was released in 1987 and wasn’t very popular either. Windows 3.0 in 1990 and criticized for being too similar to Mac’s interface, but an improvement. The software sold more than 10 million copies. In 1992, Microsoft 3.1 sold 3 million copies in its first two months. Microsoft NT, aimed at the corporate marketing appeared in 1993.

Microsoft became a public company on March 13, 1986 opening at $21 per share. Gates owned 11,142,000 shares of stock making his worth $234 million. Stocks reached $90 per share the following year.

Computer users needed a way to view websites on the internet, an innovation credited to Tim Berners-Lee i 1989. In the early 90’s the dominant browser was Netscape. Microsoft released Internet Explorer in 1995.

Windows 95 would be released in 1995 packaged with Internet Explorer, selling 7 million in its first six weeks.

Bill Gates became a billionaire at the age of 31. He would pledge to give away 98% of his wealth over time, likely to various organizations that work to improve health and education worldwide.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was formed in 1997 with the mission is to create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.

In 2013, the foundation launched a $5.5 billion effort to eradicate polio by 2018. In 2017, it announced the formation of the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network (CHAMPS), a network of disease surveillance sites in developing countries, to help prevent childhood deaths. Then, in 2018, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $300 million to helping farmers in Africa and Asia cope with climate change.

Bill Gates resigned from Microsoft as CEO in 2000.

Paul Allen left Microsoft 8 years after cofounding the company in 1975 when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. He became a philanthropist and sports team owner, and died on Oct. 15, 2018 at age 65.

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What life choices led them to be so extraordinary… what can we learn from them?