In a nostalgic tribute to the founding of Microsoft, Bill Gates has made the original source code available for public viewing. On Wednesday, he posted the code on his Gates Notes blog, marking a significant milestone in the company's history as it celebrates its 50th anniversary. Reflecting on his five decades of programming, Gates described this particular code as "the coolest code I've ever written."
Accompanied by a photo of himself holding a substantial stack of paper containing the code, Gates revealed that his inspiration stemmed from the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. This iconic magazine featured the Altair 8800 on its cover, a revolutionary personal computer developed by a small firm named MITS.
At the age of 19, Gates, alongside his Harvard friend Paul Allen, reached out to the creators of the Altair. They claimed to have a version of BASIC, a programming language designed for the Altair 8800's chip. This software was intended to enable users to program the Altair easily. However, as Gates candidly admitted, there was one critical issue: "We didn't."
Determined to deliver on their promise, Gates and his team worked tirelessly for two months, coding day and night to develop the software they had initially claimed existed. Their hard work paid off when they presented the completed code to the president of MITS, who subsequently agreed to license the software. Thus, Altair BASIC became the first product of their newly formed company, which they named Micro-Soft. Gates humorously noted that they later dropped the hyphen, leading to the company name we recognize today. "And the rest," he remarked, "is software history."
For those interested in a piece of computing history, the 50-year-old code is available for download directly from Gates's blog post. Reflecting on the evolution of computer programming over the past half-century, Gates expressed pride in how the project turned out.
In related news, Melinda French Gates, Bill Gates's former wife, has also been making headlines this week with the announcement of her upcoming book titled The Next Day, set to be released on April 15. As the release date approaches, she has begun to share insights about her marriage and its tumultuous end.
The couple divorced in 2021 after 27 years together and raising three children. In her book, Melinda reveals that in 2019, she experienced recurring nightmares about a beautiful house collapsing around her, which left her waking in panic night after night. She acknowledged Bill Gates's public admission of infidelity during their marriage and expressed her discontent regarding his connections with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Gates has since stated that he regrets meeting Epstein.
Melinda further described her troubling dreams transforming into visions of her family teetering on the edge of a cliff, where she would fall into a void. "I knew, in that moment, that I was going to have to make a decision -- and that I was going to have to make it by myself," she wrote, as reported by People magazine.
