Paul Bechtel

Mrs. Corbett

11/11/11

4th

Senior Project Paper

When computers were first invented it was unthinkable that they would ever come into

widespread use. They were enormous, loud, temperamental, extremely expensive, and on top of

all this, totally unnecessary in the life of a typical person. These issues made it obvious to anyone

paying attention that computers would forever be relegated to the scientific and mathematical

worlds, totally cut off from the mainstream consumer, but, as the technology was slowly

upgraded, people started seeing more and more computers, first in military installations, then in

government buildings, and even in their own offices. As in any new economic field, many

companies began to stake out claims in the rapidly developing computer industry. One of these

early adopters was a programming company that worked with the giant of the time, IBM, to

make one of the first commonly seen desktop computers, this company was called Microsoft,

and its impact on the world of computers has become legendary.

In the beginning, Microsoft was a dream shared by two childhood friends, Bill Gates and

Paul Allen. They had been united by a love of computers and computer programming for many

years, and in 1975, they got a chance to put this passion into effect. They read about a new

computer design coming onto the market known as a microcomputer. After looking at the

device’s specifications and design they realized something, they could improve it. The

microcomputer had a massive flaw, it couldn’t read any programs made in the BASIC

programming language, this language was one of the top three most used programming formats

at the time, and if the microcomputer didn’t support it then it could easily fail when released on

the market. Both Gates and Allen were intimately familiar with this style of programming, it was

designed specifically to be usable by new programmers and youths, so they had spent quite a bit

of time working with it. With this knowledge in hand the pair realized that could develop a

program, known as an interpreter, which would allow the microcomputer to run programs in the

BASIC format. Gates quickly made contact with the company that fronted the microcomputer,

MITS, and stated that he could make an interpreter for them. MITS accepted the offer, and when

given a demonstration of the program observed that it worked perfectly with the device it was

running on. MITS agreed to distribute the program and pay them a portion of the profit, with this

sudden victory Gates and Allen saw that they could become players in this burgeoning field, and

on April fourth, 1975 Microsoft was officially founded with Gates as the head. Over the next few

years the pair worked steadily at gaining capital for their fledgling company, they quickly

garnered a reputation for being excellent programmers and cunning businessmen, and in only

two years became an international presence, gaining an office in Japan thanks to a deal with the

Japanese magazine ASCII. In the year 1980 Microsoft began to make its first major appearance

in the computing industry, after five years of testing they released their first two operating

systems, Xenix, a polished version of the system Unix, and their crown jewel, DOS, or, Disk

Operating System. DOS was originally the brainchild of a programming group known as Seattle

Computer Products, a small firm that was ailing at the time, seeing the potential in DOS, it was

quickly purchased by Microsoft and retrofitted to work as the premier operating system for

industry giant IBM’s first personal computer. The computer and its operating system were a

smash hit, and many firms began to purchase their software exclusively from Microsoft,

catapulting it to the head of the programming pack. Shortly after their newfound power was

cemented the company lost its second-in-command, Paul Allen, resigned due to the onset of

cancer. Gates marched ahead without his long time partner and continued to oversee Microsoft’s

rise to dominance. In this time, more specifically the year 1984 that the first iteration of the now

famous Microsoft Windows operating system was released, as an add-on to DOS. This gave the

users of DOS a graphical representation of what was happening, rather than just endless lines of

code, thus making programming that much easier to comprehend. Two years later Microsoft

became a publically traded company on the stock market, earning Microsoft billions of dollars

within days. This newfound wealth, coupled with Microsoft’s recent partnership with hardware

giant IBM resulted in an investigation by the U.S. government. The two industry heads were

suspected of combining their power to crush any new market development, a serious crime by

anyone’s standards. Though the investigation failed to bring charges before either of the

corporations it heralded the start of a long chain of federal studies into Microsoft’s business

practices. While the partnership of IBM and Microsoft were battling legal threats they were also

busy innovating their respective computer fields. Microsoft released the fruit of their shared

labor, a state-of-the-art operating system to replace the aging DOS. This new framework, known

as OS/2, was to be installed in computers while they were still being assembled, a process which

IBM greatly hastened, but, unbeknownst to IBM, soon after Microsoft witnessed the successful

launch of the OS/2 software they immediately went to work on something better. Using

knowledge and features gained from their painstaking development of OS/2, Microsoft engineers

were hard at work creating the next big thing, a 32-bit operating system known as Microsoft

Windows NT. This new operating system had many improvements over OS/2, including several

groundbreaking methods of handling multiple programs that Microsoft had kept secret from its

partner. Upon hearing word of the new, Microsoft only operating system, IBM immediately

broke its partnership with the software giant.