The History Of Microsoft

When anyone hears the name Microsoft to think of one person: Bill Gates, the founder of  the company. It’s said that Bill Gates is one of the smartest programmers ever.  After reading an article on the Altair 8800 from the popular electronics magazine in 1975, Bill Gates called the creators of the Altair 8800, MITS, offering to demonstrate and importation of the BASIC programming language for the system. Gates had neither the Altair nor the interpreter. However, in only eight weeks, Bill and Paul Allen had created the interpreter. The interpreter worked without any glitches in the demo and MITS was located. On the basis of that, Microsoft was founded.

The name came from microcomputer and software coming up with Microsoft. The Microsoft name was registered with the secretary of state of New Mexico on November 26, 1976. Microsoft’s first international office was in Japan and found it on November 1, 1978. The name of the international office was ASCII, which is now known as Microsoft Japan. In January of 1979 the company packed up and moved its headquarters to Bellevue Washington. Steve Ballmer teamed up with Microsoft in June of 1980. The company had to restructure in June of 1981 in order to become an incorporated business in its new home state of Washington. This is when they changed the name to Microsoft Inc. As part of the restructuring, Bill Gates became the President of the Company and the Chairman of the Board and Paul Allen became the Executive VP.

Microsoft released their first operating system in 1980. It was a variant of  Unix. AT&T acquired the system through a distribution license, calling it Xenix. They then hired Santa Cruz operation to help to port/adapt the operating system to several platforms. This variant would become home to the first version of Microsoft’s word processor. The company went on to produce several other programs after this one. However, the disk operating system also known as DOS was the one to bring them true success. In August of 1981 IBM warded a contract to Microsoft to provide a version of the CP/M. clone called 86 -- TOS. This deal went down for less than 50,000. IBM then renamed 86-DOS to PC-dos. They changed the name due to the fact of copyright infringement problems. IBM then marketed both CP/M. and PC-DOS. CP/M. was sold for $240 and PC-DOS was sold for $40. PC-DOS became the standard edition because of its lower price.

In 1983 Microsoft created their very first own home computer system. They named it MSX. MSX contained its own version of  die DOS operation system. This very own system became very popular in South America, Japan, and Europe. Later on, the market was flooded with IBM PC clones after Columbia data products successfully cloned the IBM BIOS. This very deal allowed IBM to have total control of its own QDOS and MS-DOS. Soon powering this. Microsoft rose to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry. Microsoft released a program called Microsoft Mouse in May of 1983 expanding its product line and other markets. Ever since then Microsoft has been the biggest largest player in the industry for creating top-of-the-line software, such as their most famous product Windows.

In 2001 Microsoft entered the PC gaming world with their Xbox system. This was the first gaming console system to be released in the Gaming Market. The Xbox ranked second to Sony’s PlayStation 2. The console sold 24 million units compared to PlayStation 2 at 100 million units. The company took a $4 billion loss on the console.  It was then discontinued in late 2006. In May of 2005, Microsoft unveiled their Xbox 360 gaming console. The console had people standing out in the cold waiting to get their hands on one for hours. As soon as they hit the shelves they were sold out completely. As of January 20009  28,000,000 units have been sold worldwide.  Today the Xbox 360 is one of the hottest gaming system available on the market today.