Microsoft officially turned 50 years old yesterday. Now, I'm 52, so as far back as I can remember, Microsoft has always been around. I wasn't quite old enough to remember its founding, but it's been with me nearly my whole life.
My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer. I learned BASIC on that thing, and I still remember saving programs to cassette tape. My first experience with Microsoft came later, around my junior year of high school, when I got a PC compatible machine and started using MS-DOS. That kicked off what has been a lifelong journey through every version of DOS, every flavor of Windows, and of course, Microsoft Office.
I'll admit, back in my early DOS days, I was a WordPerfect guy. Microsoft Word just didn't have the features I liked. No reveal codes, which used to drive me nuts. But Microsoft quickly caught up, and the rest is history.
Yesterday, Bill Gates posted a great piece commemorating the anniversary. He talked about how he and Paul Allen started the company with a dream of putting a computer on every desk and in every home. In 1975, that seemed ridiculous. But they pulled it off. Microsoft helped ignite the personal computer revolution and has been a core part of nearly every major shift in technology ever since, from floppy disks to the cloud, and now to AI.
Fun fact: the first product Microsoft ever made was Altair BASIC. Gates even posted the original source code for it on his site, and you can download it and check it out if you're into that sort of thing. Back then, it was spelled "Micro-Soft" with a hyphen.
Whether you love them or hate them, Microsoft has played a massive role in shaping the tech landscape over the past 50 years. And for those of us who've been on the ride for most of it, it's pretty amazing to see how far things have come.
In fact, now that I think about it, those WordPerfect reveal codes are much more like modern-day HTML. Microsoft Word used to hide the formatting behind the scenes, and it was difficult to get to it. You couldn't just delete a bold tag, for example. I think I liked WordPerfect much better because of that.
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