Bill Gates And Microsoft
...and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and offered to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system. MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC. Gates left Harvard University, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where MITS was located and founded Microsoft there. The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan, entitled "ASCII Microsoft" (now called "Microsoft Japan"). On January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington. Steve Ballmer soon joined the company and would succeed Bill Gates as CEO. The Disk Operating System was the operating system that brought the company its real success. On August 12, 1981, IBM awarded a contract to Microsoft to provide a version of the CP/M operating system, which was set to be used in the upcoming IBM Personal Computer (PC). For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone form the Seattle Computer Products, which IBM renamed the PC-DOS. By aggressively marketing MS-DOS to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft rose from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry. The company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as a publishing division named Microsoft Press. In November of 1985, Microsoft released its first retail version of Microsoft Windows. In August, Microsoft and IBM partnered in the development of a different operating system called OS/2. On March 13, the company went public with an IPO, priced at US $28.00 by the end of the trading day. In 1989, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Office. This was a bundle of separate office productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. On May 22, 1990 Microsoft launched Windows 3.0. The new version of Microsoft's operating system boasted such new features as streamlined user interface...
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