‘Happy 50th Birthday’: Bill Gates thanks Microsoft for ’awkward photos’ | Watch

On April 4, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Micro-Soft, marking the beginning of what would become Microsoft. Just five years later, in 1980, the company secured a deal with IBM to supply software for its first personal computer.

On Saturday, in a post on Instagram, Bill Gates wrote, “Happy 50th birthday, @microsoft. Thanks for the memories—and awkward photo shoots.” In the reel, he mentioned, "Unfortunately, I'll never feel cool again because this was me in the early Microsoft days".

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Earlier on Friday, while the code Gates typed on a teletype machine may seem primitive compared to today’s advanced AI systems, it was pivotal in founding Microsoft in April 1975—a milestone the Redmond, Washington-based company will commemorate this Friday.

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As reported by AP, Gates, 69, shared a blog post reflecting on how he and his high school friend, the late Paul Allen, hurried to establish the world’s first “software factory” after discovering an article in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics about the Altair 8800. This minicomputer, powered by a small chip from the then-unknown tech company Intel, sparked their groundbreaking venture.

The article sparked an idea in Gates, then a Harvard freshman, and Allen to contact Altair’s manufacturer, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. They assured the company’s CEO, Ed Roberts, that they had developed software to help consumers operate the hardware. The problem was, they hadn’t actually created the code yet.

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To solve this, Gates and Allen turned to the BASIC programming language, which had been developed in 1964 at Dartmouth College. However, they still needed to find a way to adapt the technology for the upcoming Altair computer, even though they didn’t have a prototype to work with.

The trip down memory lane included the February release of a memoir exploring his early years as an often-misunderstood child with few friends, and a hailing of the 25th anniversary of the philanthropic foundation he created after stepping down as Microsoft's CEO in 2000. The tech giant initially stumbled after Gates' departure but has been thriving under CEO Satya Nadella, and has amassed a market value of about $2.8 trillion.