Gates was first exposed to computers at school in the late s with his friend Paul Allen, the son of two Seattle librarians. By the time Gates was 14, the two friends were writing and testing computer programs for fun and profit. In they established their first company, Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer that recorded and analyzed traffic data.
Allen went on to study computer science at the University of Washington and then dropped out to work at Honeywell, while Gates enrolled at Harvard. Later that year Gates left college to work full time developing programming languages for the Altair, and he and Allen relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be near MITS Computer, where Allen took a position as director of software development. Gates and Allen named their partnership Micro-soft. A year later, Gates published "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" in the Altair newsletter, in which he enjoined users to avoid illegally copied software.
Arguing that software piracy prevented "good software from being written," Gates wrote prophetically, "Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software. The following year Gates and Allen moved the company to Bellevue, Washington. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft retained the right to sell the operating system to other companies and to consumers, while IBM could not.
Neither company could have foreseen the value of this arrangement: as other manufacturers developed hardware compatible with the IBM PC, and as personal computing became a multibillion-dollar business, the fast and powerful MS-DOS became the industry's leading operating system, and Microsoft's revenues skyrocketed.
The year also saw the arrival of Steve Ballmer, a close friend of Gates from Harvard, who was hired to organize the non-technical side of the business. Ballmer later recalled the company's stormy beginnings under Gates's leadership: "Our first major row came when I insisted it was time to hire 17 people. He claimed I was trying to bankrupt him.
In the company was incorporated as Microsoft, Inc. Two years later Allen left Microsoft after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. He remained on the board of directors and continued to hold more than 10 percent of the company's stock.
Also in Microsoft launched a word processing program, Word 1. Simpler to use and less expensive than WordStar, Word used a mouse to move the cursor and was able to display bold and italic type on the screen.
Nevertheless, some users felt that the product was too complex--designed for software engineers rather than business users--and it was quickly surpassed in the market by WordPerfect, released by the WordPerfect Corporation. Word did not become a success until its greatly improved version 3. Throughout its history, Microsoft has been known for releasing products that were initially unsuccessful but eventually grew to dominate their categories.
Many reviewers have been harsh in their criticism: David Kirkpatrick, writing in Fortune, described the first release of one product as a "typically unreliable, bug-ridden Microsoft mess," while Brent Schlender noted in the same magazine that "from its beginnings, Microsoft has been notorious for producing inelegant products that are frequently inferior and bringing them to the market way behind schedule. Microsoft worked closely with Apple during the development of Apple's Macintosh computer, which was introduced in Revolutionary in its design, the Mac featured a graphical user interface based on icons rather than the typed commands used by the IBM PC, making its programs simple to use and easy to learn, even by computer novices.
On March 21, , a major offensive against Allied positions in the Somme River region of France began with five hours of bombardment from more Just after 6 p. Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. On this day in , German forces in the throes of a major spring offensive on the Western Front launch a renewed attack on Allied positions between the Somme and Avre Rivers. In it, he says that there is a common link forming between the civil rights and In the dream, Lincoln asked a soldier standing guard President William Henry Harrison dies after serving only 32 days in office on this day in Harrison holds the unfortunate presidential record of shortest term in office.
Ironically, the man with the shortest White House tenure delivered the longest inaugural address in Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother went to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Microsoft reaches a settlement with the Department of Justice in the antitrust case. In November, Microsoft enters the gaming market with the North American release of its Xbox gaming console.
The music player fails to take off and Microsoft discontinues it by mid Microsoft, hoping for a hit, launches Surface tablets and a Windows 8 operating system that uses touch commands. You must be logged in to post a comment. In questi anni inizia la storia di Microsoft, in questi anni si fa la storia della tecnologia.
The language is perfectly efficient and functioning and pushes Gates and Allen to start their own business. Gates and Allen immediately focused on this new project : the first left his job at MITS, the second left his studies at Harvard University. The new Basic language extends and empowers the computers functionality by the standards of time, ensuring the ability to respond to custom management needs. We are in the 70s and what is happening begins to take the shape of a revolution. The days in the office were marked by the typewriter.
To copy a document you needed a mimeograph or carbon paper. In just a few months, all of this began to belong to the past. The project expanded more and more. Microsoft is already a leader in this sector and begins to sell its product to major companies. In , the first international headquarter was opened in Japan. In , the company's headquarter was moved to Redmond in Washington, still the current location and made an agreement with Apple to develop products for the Mac.
In the first European office opened in Belgium. The company accepts the proposed collaboration for IBM and creates an operating system for their computers: the Qs-Dos that Microsoft develops and grants to IBM under license and then evolves into Ms-Dos the ancestor of Windows. The turning point came in , when Gates and Allen developed the Microsoft Windows operating system.
For the first time in the history of technology, users can interact with the PC, not only by typing letters and numbers, but also by clicking on the elements on the screen, managing even more unrelated programs simultaneously.
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