On Friday, April 4, tech giant Microsoft turned 50. As part of the celebrations, the company’s leaders and employees came together at the headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to reminisce about the glory days of the world’s famous software company. Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of the company, took to his Instagram account to share a post dedicated to the occasion. The 69-year-old, who was the CEO of Microsoft until 2000, shared a set of images from his early days with the company.
The Instagram reel on his official account begins with a selfie of him sitting on a couch in the present day and later flashes images from the early days of his stint with the tech giant. “Happy 50th birthday, @microsoft. Thanks for the memories—and awkward photo shoots,” Gates captioned the reel. The short video begins with the text, “Unfortunately I’ll never feel cool again because this was me in the early Microsoft days.” His post attracted around 80k likes.
Earlier this week, Gates shared a piece of software history, essentially the original source code that started it all. On April 2, in his blog Gates Notes, he announced that he was making ‘the coolest code’ he has ever written free to download by anyone. “Making it 50 years is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn’t have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella—along with the many people who have worked at Microsoft over the years,” he wrote.
Gates termed the 50-year milestone as a ‘bittersweet’ moment. He said that it felt like just yesterday that Paul Allen and he were hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard’s computer lab writing the code that would become the first product of their company. “In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new ways to make life easier and work more productive. Making it 50 years is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn’t have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella – along with many people who have worked at Microsoft over the years,” read the opening lines of the blog.
Talking about the first code, Gates said that it remains the coolest code that he has ever written to this day. He shared that the story of Microsoft began with a magazine. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine featured an Altair 8800 on its cover. The device, created by a small company, MITS, was, according to Gates, a groundbreaking personal computer kit that promised to bring computing power to hobbyists. “When Paul (Allen) and I saw that cover, we knew two things: the PC revolution was imminent, and we wanted to get in on the ground floor,” he wrote, adding that at that time personal computers were practically non-existent.
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