Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen tried to do business with their computer programming skills. [16] In 1972, they founded Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze traffic data. Gates enrolled at Harvard University, while Allen earned a degree in computer science from Washington State University, although he later dropped out to work at Honeywell. [17] The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics contained the Altair 8800 microcomputer from Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), [18], which inspired Allen to suggest that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device. Gates called MITS, claiming he had a functional interpreter, and mits asked for a demonstration. Allen was working on a simulator for Altair, while Gates was developing the performer, and it worked perfectly when they presented it at MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March 1975. MITS has agreed to distribute and market it as Altair BASIC. [15]:108, 112-114 Gates and Allen founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975 with Gates as CEO,[19] and Allen proposed the name “Micro-Soft,” abbreviated for microcomputer software. [20] [21] In August 1977, the company entered into an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, which led to its first international office of Microsoft ASCII. [22] Microsoft moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington, in January 1979. [19] Since 2015 [Update], Microsoft has been dominant in the IBM PC compatible operating systems market and the Office software suite market, although it has lost most of the entire operating system market to Android. [8] The company also produces a wide range of other consumer and enterprise software for desktops, laptops, tabs, gadgets, and servers, including Internet search (with Bing), digital services market (via MSN), mixed reality (HoloLens), cloud computing (Azure), and software development (Visual Studio).

After Bill Gates` internal “Internet Tidal Wave Memo” on May 26, 1995, Microsoft began to redefine its offerings and expand its product line to computer networks and the World Wide Web. [39] With a few exceptions to new companies like Netscape, Microsoft was the only large established company to act fast enough to be virtually part of the World Wide Web from the beginning.