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In a nostalgic nod to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, co-founder Bill Gates has released the original source code that propelled the tech giant’s inception. Gates shared the foundational code on his blog, Gates Notes, on Wednesday, reflecting on the early chapters of the company. Despite his extensive coding history spanning five decades, Gates described this particular code as “the coolest code I’ve ever written.”
Microsoft’s Foundational Code
Accompanying his blog post with an image of himself holding paper printouts of the code, Bill Gates recounted his inspiration from the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. The publication featured the Altair 8800, a pioneering personal computer from MITS, on its cover.
Inspired, a young 19-year-old Gates and his Harvard associate Paul Allen contacted the creators of Altair. They asserted they possessed a BASIC programming language version compatible with the Altair 8800’s processor, software that would enable users to program the device.
“There was just one problem,” Gates admitted, “We didn’t.”
Birth of Micro-Soft
Gates disclosed that he and his collaborators engaged in intense, around-the-clock coding for two months to develop the software they had prematurely claimed to have. Subsequently, Gates and Allen presented the newly developed code to the president of MITS, who consented to license the software. “Altair BASIC became the inaugural product of our nascent venture, initially named Micro-Soft,” Gates explained. “We subsequently eliminated the hyphen.”
This marked a pivotal moment in software history. The 50-year-old code is available for download from Gates’s blog post. “Computer programming has advanced significantly over the past half-century, yet I remain exceptionally proud of the initial outcome,” he stated.
Melinda French Gates’ New Memoir
Melinda French Gates, Bill Gates’ former spouse, is also in the news with her forthcoming book, “The Next Day,” slated for release on April 15. Leading up to the launch, she has begun to speak publicly about the dissolution of her marriage to Bill Gates.
The pair finalized their divorce in 2021 after a 27-year marriage and raising three children. As reported by People magazine, Melinda French Gates recounts in her memoir experiencing recurring nightmares in 2019: “having nightmares about a beautiful house collapsing all around her — and then waking up in a panic night after night.”
She corroborated Bill Gates’ public acknowledgements of infidelity during their marriage. She also expressed her dismay over his encounters with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, meetings which Bill Gates has since publicly regretted.
Melinda French Gates further detailed the evolution of her unsettling dreams, which transformed into visions of her family positioned precariously on a cliff edge, culminating in her “plummeting” into emptiness. “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 quoted in People.