Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates remembers the groundbreaking piece of computer code he wrote 50 years ago that ushered in a new era in technology.
The code, written on a primitive teletype, played a key role in the creation of Microsoft on April 4, 1975.
On the company's 50th anniversary, Gates recalled how he and his high school friend Paul Allen created the world's first "software factory" after reading a January 1975 article about the Altair 8800, a computer powered by a chip made by then-little-known technology company Intel.
The article inspired Gates, then a freshman at Harvard University, who believed that enabling Intel's semiconductor chips to run a version of the Basic programming language would revolutionize the industry.
Allen then called MITS, the manufacturer of the Altair 8800, and assured CEO Ed Roberts that they had developed software that would allow users to control the hardware. In reality, however, Gates and Allen had yet to write the code they had promised Roberts.
The two solved the problem by using the Basic programming language and figuring out how to make it compatible with the upcoming Altair computer, even though they had never seen a prototype.
After "programming day and night for two months," Gates completed the code that laid the foundation for the Altair's first operating system, and MITS agreed to license the software. Altair Basic, a programming language interpreter for the Altair 8800, became the first product under the name Micro-Soft, Gates and Allen's new company.
"We considered creating a similar tool called a compiler, which would translate the entire program and run it all at once. However, we thought the line-by-line approach of an interpreter would be more useful to programmers, because it provided immediate feedback on the code, allowing them to fix errors as they arose," Gates recalled.
On his personal blog, Bill Gates called it “the coolest piece of code” he had ever written in 50 years. The code would later become the foundation for Microsoft to make personal computers a household item, with a basic suite of software including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and the Windows operating system that runs most personal computers today.
“It was the revolution that paved the way for personal computing,” Gates said, adding that the 50-year journey was a long one and “it’s crazy that the dream has come true.”
Bill Gates also shared the source code that laid the foundation for the company, contained in a 157-page PDF file.