‡ Top: Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, Jim Lane.

Middle: Bob O'Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin.
‡ Bottom: Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, Paul Allen.


 
 Timeline:

‡
‡ Microsoft is a Multinational computer
technology corporation.

‡ Multinational means:
‡ A business Enterprise Operating in several
nations, especially Involved in World
Market.
 Title

‡ The history of Microsoft began on April 4,

1975.
‡ Its current best-selling products are the
Microsoft Windows operating system
and the Microsoft Office suite of
productivity software.
‡ Founded by:
‡ Bill Gates
‡ & Paul Allen:
‡ Starting in 1980,
‡ Microsoft formed an important partnership
with IBM
‡ IBM allowed them to bundle Microsoft's
Operating System with computers that
they sold, paying Microsoft a royalty for
every sale.
‡ In 1985:
‡ IBM requested that Microsoft write a new
OS or Operating System for their
computers called OS/2.

‡ Microsoft wrote the operating system, but

also continued to sell their own alternative.
‡ Microsoft Windows eventually
Overshadowed OS/2 in terms of sales.

‡ Overshadowed ± to seem to has less

than full merit.
‡ When Microsoft launched several versions
of Microsoft Windows in the 1990s,

‡ they had captured over 
market share

of the world's personal computers.
‡ The company has now become largely
successful.

‡ As of 2008, Microsoft has a global annual

revenue of _S $ 6 .42 billion and nearly
  employees in 1  Countries.
‡ After reading the January 1, 1975 issue of
Popular Electronics that demonstrated the
Altair 8800,
‡ Bill Gates called the creators of a
VewMicrocomputer,.
‡ MITS (Micro Instrumentation and
Telemetry Systems), offering to
demonstrate an implementation of the
BASIC programming language for the
system.
‡ Bill Gates left Harvard University,
‡ moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico,
‡ where MITS was located, and
‡ founded Microsoft there.
‡ Bill Gates became president of the
company and Chairman of the Board,
while

‡ Paul Allen became Executive Vice

President.
‡ 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.
‡ 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 WYSIWYG or
‡ "What You See Is What You Get³.
‡ Word was also the first application with
such features as the ability to display ‘old
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 ‘e
distri‘uted on-disk with a magazine.
‡ @OS (Disk Operating System) was the
operating system that brought the
company its real success.

‡ Microsoft did not have an operating

system when they closed the deal with
IBM and IBM hadn't done their homework.
‡ 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-@OS;
‡ this became relatively popular in Japan
Europe and South America.
‡ With the release of the Microsoft Mouse
on May 2, 1983,

‡ Mouse was came from Xerox Company.

‡ 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.