Flavour of the Month: Windows to opportunities

Spotting a latent demand and building an enterprise to meet that demand is what differentiates an entrepreneur from the rest. When Ziff-Davis Publishing brought out their magazine - Popular Electronics, little did they knew that their endeavor would change the software skyline of the world in the coming years.

World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models

This headline on the cover of Popular Electronics, which spoke about Altair 8800 caught the entrepreneurial imagination of young Bill Gates and Paul Allen, signaled to them that computer prices would come down and a profitable business could be constructed by selling software written exclusively for them.

Gates and Allen clearly identified market for computers as the next biggest thing. Within a few days, Gates initiated talks with the creators of Altair--Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). He offered them the job of developing BASIC on the Altair platform.

Whilst MITS was unaware of the fact that they were yet to write a single line of code, it still seemed excited about the proposition and wanted to see the code written by them. Gates and Allen began a combined effort and divided the work between them. Allen took care of simulating the Altair even as Gates put forth the coding for the program and in the next two months, they got their work together.

As Allen made his way to MITS and entered the program into Altair, he had touched it for the first time in his life. Had the Altair simulation, which Allen had devised on Gates’s codes failed, the exhibition would have ended in a disaster.

However, the program put together by the two went on to fit the bill. Soon, MITS had entered into a deal with Allen and Gates to lay their hands on to their program. The deadly duo had done their BASIC’s right and certain necessary changes took place in both their lives.

Gates moved to a newer place (Albuquerque in New Mexico where MITS was housed) leaving Harvard University and Microsoft was born. On November 29, 1975 Bill had penned down a letter to Allen where he first made a mention of the name MICROSOFT, a shortened combo of Microcomputer and software.

A year later (November 26, 1976), Microsoft was a registered entity and two years later, Japan housed the organization’s very first international office.

Rapid movements in locations took place in the initial years of its operations and the company moved to its new home on the first day of 1979 from Albuquerque to Bellevue in Washington.

The current CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, joined in 1980 and the firm brought out its first OS (Operating System), which was a modification of UNIX that very year. Named as Xenix, Microsoft had laid its hands on this via a distribution license from AT&T, and this variant provided ideal platform for Microsoft Word.

June 25, 1981 saw Microsoft restructuring itself and became Microsoft, Inc. with Gates donning the role of president and chairman, while his partner Allen became the executive vice president.

Clicking its way to success

Microsoft brought its first accomplishment with the Disk Operating System (DOS) and it won IBM’s contract for offering an Operating System for its Personal Computer. By 1983, Microsoft aided by myriad alliances brought home its computer system, which was named as MSX, which sold like hot cakes in countries of South America, Europe and Japan.

MS-DOS was soon a household name and on May 2, 1983 the company unveiled its Mouse for its growing user base to click. The year 1983 also witnessed it coming up with its Word processor. From displaying texts in bold, Word was a concept, which was an instant hit when it made its debut in 1983.

However, Gates did a masterstroke when he bundled the demonstration copies of the software along with the November issue of PC World. This move made MS Word the first ever program to be issued on disk inside a magazine.

From being just another player in software space, Gates clicked his way to successful software sojourns.