Micosoft

After reading the January 1, 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Bill Gates called the creators of the new microcomputer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system.[22] Gates had neither an interpreter nor an Altair system, yet in the eight weeks before the demo he and Allen developed the interpreter. The interpreter worked at the demo and MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC.[7] Gates left Harvard University, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where MITS was located, and founded Microsoft there. The name Microsoft, without the hyphen, was first used in a letter from Gates to Allen on November 29, 1975,[7] and on November 26, 1976 the name became a registered trademark.[22] The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan, entitled "ASCII Microsoft" (now called "Microsoft Japan").[22] On January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to a new home in Bellevue, Washington. [22] Steve Ballmer joined the company on June 11, 1980, and would later succeed Bill Gates as CEO.[22] The company restructured on June 25, 1981, to become an incorporated business in its home state of Washington (with a further change of its name to "Microsoft, Inc."). As part of the restructuring, Bill Gates became president of the company and Chairman of the Board, and Paul Allen became Executive Vice President.[22]

The first operating system the company publicly released was a variant of Unix in 1980. Acquired from AT&T through a distribution license, Microsoft dubbed it Xenix and hired Santa Cruz Operation in order to port/adapt the operating system to several platforms.[23][24] This Unix variant would become home to the first version of Microsoft's word processor, Microsoft Word. Originally titled "Multi-Tool Word", Microsoft Word became notable for its concept of "What You See Is What You Get", or WYSIWYG. Word was also the first application with such features as the ability to display bold text. It was first released in the spring of 1983, and free demonstration copies of the application were bundled with the November 1983 issue of PC World, making it the first program to be distributed on-disk with a magazine.[25] However, Xenix was never sold to end users, and by the mid-1980s Microsoft got out of the Unix business entirely.[23]

DOS (Disk Operating System) was the operating system that brought the company its real success. On August 12, 1981, after negotiations with Digital Research failed, IBM awarded a contract to Microsoft to provide a version of the CP/M operating system, which was set to be used in the upcoming IBM Personal Computer (PC). For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for less than US$50,000, which IBM renamed to PC-DOS. Due to potential copyright infringement problems with CP/M, IBM marketed both CP/M and PC-DOS for US$240 and US$40, respectively, with PC-DOS eventually becoming the standard because of its lower price.[26][27] Around 1983, in collaboration with numerous companies, Microsoft created a home computer system, MSX, which contained its own version of the DOS operating system, entitled MSX-DOS; this became relatively popular in Japan, Europe and South America [7][28][29]. Later, the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones after Columbia Data Products successfully cloned the IBM BIOS, quickly followed by Eagle Computer and Compaq [30][31][32][33]. The deal with IBM allowed Microsoft to have control of its own QDOS derivative, MS-DOS, and through aggressive marketing of the operating system to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones Microsoft rose from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry.[34] With the release of the Microsoft Mouse on May 2, 1983, Microsoft continued to expand its product line in other markets. This expansion included Microsoft Press, a book publishing division, on July 11 the same year, which debuted with two titles: "Exploring the IBM PCjr Home Computer" by Peter Norton, and "The Apple Macintosh Book" by Cary Lu.[22]

The Republic of Ireland became home to Microsoft's first international production facility in 1985, and on November 20 Microsoft released its first retail version of Microsoft Windows, originally a graphical extension for its MS-DOS operating system.[22] In August, Microsoft and IBM partnered in the development of a different operating system called OS/2. OS/2 was marketed in connection with a new hardware design proprietary to IBM, the PS/2.[36] Shortly afterwards on February 16, 1986, Microsoft relocated to Redmond, Washington. Around one month later, on March 13, the company went public with an IPO, raising US$61 million at US$21.00 per share. By the end of the trading day, the price had risen to US$28.00. In 1987, Microsoft eventually released their first version of OS/2 to OEMs.[37]

Meanwhile, Microsoft began introducing its most prominent office products. Microsoft Works, an integrated office program which combined features typically found in a word processor, spreadsheet, database and other office applications, saw its first release as an application for the Apple Macintosh towards the end of 1986.[7] Microsoft Works would later be sold with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Bookshelf, a reference collection introduced in 1987 that was the company's first CD-ROM product.[22][38] Later, on August 8, 1989, Microsoft would introduce its most successful office product, Microsoft Office. Unlike the model of Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office was a bundle of separate office productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and so forth. While Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office were mostly developed internally, Microsoft also continued its trend of rebranding products from other companies, such as SQL Server on January 13, 1988, a relational database management system for companies that was based on technology licensed from Sybase.[22]

On May 22, 1990 Microsoft launched Windows 3.0.[7] The new version of Microsoft's operating system boasted such new features as streamlined user interface graphics and improved protected mode capability for the Intel 386 processor; it sold over 100,000 copies in two weeks.[7][39] Windows at the time generated more revenue for Microsoft than OS/2, and the company decided to move more resources from OS/2 to Windows.[40] In an internal memo to Microsoft employees on May 16, 1991, Bill Gates announced that the OS/2 partnership was over, and that Microsoft would henceforth focus its platform efforts on Windows and the