That he also created the foundation with the aim of improving global healthcare, reducing poverty and expanding educational opportunities might have been even more of a shock. To sell the product, they needed a company – and Microsoft, without the hyphen, was born.Ģ000: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launchedįor anyone who followed Microsoft and Gates in the 80s and 90s, the biggest surprise in his career is probably endowing most of his money to a charitable foundation. Gates and Allen had already started another company before Microsoft, called Traf-O-Data, but it was the opportunity to create a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800 from Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), which the magazine Popular Electronics described as the “world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models”, that really spurred their business careers. ![]() Allen was so obsessed that, as Gates revealed in a 1995 interview with Time magazine, he wasn't allowed to graduate until his parents had paid off the $200 bill for extra computer time. ![]() The two, who had been friends since school, had been obsessed with computers at a time when they were the size of cars and you worked with them remotely via teletype.įortunately, they went to a school that had the funds to install a teletype for computer access – a rarity in the 1960s – although pupils had to pay for computer time over and above their “free” allocation. Although they didn't register the trademark until the following year, by the age of 20 Gates and school friend Paul Allen were already running Microsoft – or rather “Micro-Soft”, as they were calling it at the time.
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