On April 4, 2025, we will celebrate 50 years since the founding of Microsoft, initially known as ‘Micro-Soft’. Co-founder Bill Gates has shared a blog post reflecting on this milestone, which features a PDF of the original source code pivotal to the company’s beginnings.

This retrospective highlights the incredible advancements in technology over half a century. Gates notes, “We were doing that just 50 years ago?” emphasizing how far personal computing has come since Microsoft’s inception.

Notably, the original code was penned using a teleprinter, an innovative tool at the time. The Altair BASIC interpreter created by Gates and Allen for this system was crucial in ushering in the personal computing era. As Gates puts it, “Altair BASIC became the first product of our new company, which we decided to call Micro-Soft. (We later dropped the hyphen.)”

This success stemmed from their vision to democratize computing, allowing the public to engage with technology in their homes. One significant step was creating software that enabled users to program the Altair. Gates recalls, “We coded day and night for two months to create the software we had said already existed.”

The journey to this point reflects just how rapidly technology evolved, leading us to today’s landscape filled with smartphones and AI. Fifty years on, we wonder: could even the brightest minds of that era have imagined the world we live in now?