Microsoft Founded by Gates and Allen

# April 4, 1975: Microsoft is Born in a Motel Room

On April 4, 1975, two young men from Seattle—Bill Gates, a 19-year-old Harvard dropout, and Paul Allen, 22—officially founded a little company they called "Micro-Soft" (the hyphen would later disappear). This wasn't some grandiose launch in a fancy office or research lab. It happened in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they'd set up shop to be near their first customer.

The story leading up to this moment is the stuff of tech legend. Just months earlier, in January 1975, Allen had spotted the cover of *Popular Electronics* magazine at a newsstand in Harvard Square. It featured the Altair 8800, the first commercially successful personal computer. The Altair was basically a blue metal box with switches and lights—no keyboard, no monitor—but Allen and Gates saw something revolutionary.

Here's where it gets wild: Gates and Allen contacted MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the Albuquerque company that made the Altair, and boldly claimed they had developed a BASIC programming language interpreter for the machine. This was a complete bluff—they hadn't written a single line of code yet! They didn't even have an Altair to test on.

MITS president Ed Roberts called their bluff and said, "Sure, show me." Panic mode engaged. For the next eight weeks, Allen and Gates worked frantically. Allen used Harvard's PDP-10 mainframe to create an Altair simulator, while Gates wrote the actual BASIC interpreter. They had to make this software work on a machine they'd never touched, with only 4KB of memory—about enough to store a few paragraphs of text by today's standards.

The moment of truth came when Allen flew to Albuquerque with the code on a paper tape. He'd never tested it on a real Altair. He fed the tape into the machine, held his breath, and... it worked! Well, mostly—there were bugs, but it ran. Roberts was impressed enough to license their software.

This success led Gates and Allen to formalize their partnership on April 4, 1975. They chose the name "Micro-Soft," combining "microcomputer" and "software." Gates remained in Albuquerque to work with MITS while maintaining his Harvard connection, though he'd soon drop out permanently.

What makes this date so significant isn't just that a company was founded—companies start every day. It's that this moment represented a fundamental shift in computing philosophy. Before Microsoft, computers were hardware businesses; software was just given away or bundled in. Gates and Allen bet everything on the radical idea that software itself had value, that it was intellectual property worth protecting and selling.

Their controversial "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in 1976 would declare that copying software without paying was theft, infuriating the hobbyist community that believed software should be free. But this position ultimately created the commercial software industry as we know it.

From that Albuquerque beginning, Microsoft would grow to dominate personal computing, making Gates the world's richest person for years and fundamentally shaping how billions of people interact with technology today. The MS-DOS operating system, Windows, Office—all of it traces back to that April day in 1975 when two ambitious friends made their partnership official.

Not bad for a company that started because two guys lied about having a product, then frantically coded it into existence just in time!

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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI