Technology History | Microsoft — Altair BASIC Written Next to MITS on California Street
· 1975-4
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Technology History | Microsoft — Altair BASIC Written Next to MITS on California Street
kevin
People treat Microsoft as the Redmond campus that always sold a Windows license from an S and P 500 book.
The first book sat in a strip of rooms next to a kit-computer shop in Albuquerque.
On 4 April 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen formalized Micro-Soft after selling a BASIC interpreter to Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems for the Altair 8800. MITS occupied the Cal Linn Building. Microsoft rented space next door at the corner of California Street Northeast and Linn Avenue Northeast.
Allen had taken a software job at MITS that spring. Gates left Harvard that summer. The earliest written use of the hyphenated name appears in a letter dated 29 July 1975.
Year-end partnership sales for 1975 were 16,005 dollars. The 60-40 split favored Gates. Marc McDonald became the first salaried employee in 1976.
The mechanism was a language that let a buyer of a mail-order microcomputer write programs without toggling switches on the front panel.
A later plaque on the sidewalk records the founding site. The building is a public commercial strip. The pin is that corner, not a later Bellevue or Redmond floor.
The firm left Albuquerque on 1 January 1979.
Photo: Albuquerque streetscape used as place context, via Wikimedia Commons.
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