Bill Gates Publishes Original Microsoft Source Code in a Blog Post

Want to see the original source code that started Microsoft? Bill Gates is sharing it. On Wednesday, the Microsoft co-founder posted on his Gates Notes blog, reminiscing about the company's early days for its 50th anniversary this year. Gates has certainly written plenty of code over those five decades, but he called this "the coolest code I've ever written," and shared a photo of himself holding a huge pile of paper showing the code. Gates writes that he was inspired by the January 1975 copy of Popular Electronics magazine, which featured a cover photo of an Altair 8800, a groundbreaking personal computer created by a small company called MITS. The then 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 writes. "We didn't." Micro-Soft was born Gates says he ... Read full article.