If you want to see the original source code that started Microsoft, Bill Gates is now sharing it. On Wednesday, the Microsoft co-founder posted it on his Gates Notes blog, reminiscing about the company’s early days for its 50th anniversary. Gates has written plenty of code in those five decades but he called this “the coolest code I’ve ever written.”
Sharing a photo of himself holding a huge pile of paper showing the code, Gates wrote that he was inspired by the January 1975 copy of Popular Electronics magazine. The magazine had featured a cover photo of an Altair 8800, a groundbreaking personal computer created by a small company called MITS.
The 19-year-old Gates and his Harvard pal Paul Allen reached out to Altair’s creators and told them they had a version of the programming language BASIC for the chip that the Altair 8800 ran on. Such software would let people program the Altair.
“There was just one problem,” Gates wrote. “We didn’t.”
Micro-Soft is born
Gates said he and friends “coded day and night for two months to create the software we said already existed.” Gates and Allen then presented the code to the president of MITS, who agreed to license the software. “Altair BASIC became the first product of our new company, which we decided to call Micro-Soft,” Gates wrote. “We later dropped the hyphen.”
And the rest, as they say, is software history. You can download that 50-year-old code from Gates’s post. “Computer programming has come a long way over the last 50 years, but I’m still super proud of how it turned out,” he wrote.
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Melinda Gates: new book
Also making headlines this week was Gates’s former wife, Melinda French Gates, whose new book, The Next Day, comes out April 15. As that date approaches, she’s opening up about the end of her marriage to Gates.
The couple divorced in 2021 after 27 years and three children. According to People magazine, Melinda French Gates wrote in the book that in 2019 she was “having nightmares about a beautiful house collapsing all around her — and then waking up in a panic night after night.”
She acknowledged what Bill Gates has publicly stated — that he wasn’t always faithful in the marriage — and said she was also disturbed by Gates’s meetings with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Gates has since said he regrets meeting Epstein.
Melinda French Gates said her bad dreams would eventually change into images of her family on the edge of a cliff where she “plummeted” into a void. “I knew, in that moment, that I was going to have to make a decision — and that I was going to have to make it by myself,” she wrote, according to the People article.
