Microsoft is 50 years old this year, and Bill Gates returns to the way the company has started.
The co-founder of Microsoft published a blog article on the code on Wednesday which would become the first product of the company, which was the Altair Basic, an interpreter who translated the code into instructions that the micro-computer Altair 8800 could read.
“This code remains the coolest code that I have ever written to date,” wrote Gates. “It is incredible to think about how this piece of code led to half a century of Microsoft innovation. Before it was active or Windows 95 or Xbox or AI, there was the original source code – and I always get it to see it, even all these years later.”
At the end of his post, he included a PDF of the original source code for the Altair Basic – the 157 pages of it. You can check it here.
In his blog article, Gates noted that the co-founder of the late Microsoft Paul Allen finished part of the code on a flight to Albuquerque, in New Mexico, where Microsoft was originally based. Gates shared other details on the source code, rightly so, in its “source code” memories, which was released in February.
Gates thought about his childhood throughout his career in the book. He wrote that it was disinterested in growing up from school, noting that his preschool teachers called him “rebellious” and said he showed “a total lack of concern for any phase of school life”.
Gates also wrote on his approach, decades later, to recruit Steve Ballmer in Microsoft, saying that he and Allen had accepted a distribution of 64% and 36%, respectively, but Gates ended up giving a 4% stake to Ballmer to convince him to leave the business school for Microsoft.
The ex-wife of Gates, Melinda French Gates, has his own memories, “the next day”, later this month.