History Of Microsoft
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History Of Microsoft
Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its current best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system; Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software; Xbox, a line of entertainment of games, music, and video; Bing, a line of search engines; and Microsoft Azure, a cloud services platform. In 1980, Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM to bundle Microsoft's operating system with IBM computers; with that deal, IBM paid Microsoft a royalty for every sale. In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2. Microsoft Windows eventually overshadowed OS/2 in terms of sales. When Microsoft launched several versions of Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, they had ...
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Microsoft Logo And Wordmark
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washington, United States. Its best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2019. It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to domina ...
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Altair 8800
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in ''Radio-Electronics'', and in other hobbyist magazines. The Altair is widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution as the first commercially successful personal computer. The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a ''de facto'' standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC. "This announcement ltair 8800ranks with IBM's announcement of the System/360 a decade earlier as one of the most significant in the history of computing." History While serving at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, Ed Roberts and Forrest M. Mims III decided to use their electronics background ...
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Microsoft Japan
Microsoft Japan, officially , is a subsidiary of Microsoft based in Japan. Their headquarters are near to Shinagawa station at Minato-ku district of Tokyo. History In 1978, Kazuhiko Nishi, co-founder of ASCII Publisher, partnered with Bill Gates and founded as the sole dealer of Microsoft's products in Japan. In 1980, ASCII made 1.2 billion yen of sales from licensing Microsoft BASIC. It was 40 percent of Microsoft's sales, and Nishi became Microsoft's Vice President of Sales for Far East. In 1983, ASCII and Microsoft announced MSX. In 1984, ASCII Microsoft was merged to ASCII. However, Microsoft founded its own Japan subsidiary, often shortened to ''MSKK'', and dissolved partnership with ASCII in 1986. It was because Gates wanted Microsoft to go public in the New York Stock Exchange, and also he opposed Nishi and ASCII's diversification. , who was also a member of ASCII, officially became the first president of Microsoft Kabushiki Kaisha. ASCII kept rights of MSX. In Oc ...
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ASCII (company)
was a Japanese publishing company based in Chiyoda, Tokyo. It became a subsidiary of Kadokawa Group Holdings in 2004, and merged with another Kadokawa subsidiary MediaWorks on April 1, 2008, becoming ASCII Media Works. The company published '' Monthly ASCII'' as the main publication. ASCII is best known for creating the ''Derby Stallion'' video game series, the MSX computer, and the ''RPG Maker'' line of programming software. History 1977–1990: Founding and first projects ASCII was founded in 1977 by Kazuhiko Nishi and Keiichiro Tsukamoto. Originally the publisher of a magazine with the same name, ''ASCII'', talks between Bill Gates and Nishi led to the creation of Microsoft's first overseas sales office, ASCII Microsoft, in 1978.Quote from Bill Gates' ''The Road Ahead'', found in In 1980, ASCII made 1.2 billion yen of sales from licensing Microsoft BASIC. It was 40 percent of Microsoft's sales, and Nishi became Microsoft's Vice President of Sales for Far East. In 1983, AS ...
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Software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists of machine language instructions supported by an individual processor—typically a central processing unit (CPU) or a graphics processing unit (GPU). Machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. For example, an instruction may change the value stored in a particular storage location in the computer—an effect that is not directly observable to the user. An instruction may also invoke one of many input or output operations, for example displaying some text on a computer screen; causing state changes which should be visible to the user. The processor executes the instructions in the order they are provided, unless it is instructed ...
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Portmanteau
A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsGarner's Modern American Usage
, p. 644.
in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, as in ''smog'', coined by blending ''smoke'' and ''fog'', or ''motel'', from ''motor'' and ''hotel''. In , a portmanteau is a single morph that is analyzed as representing two (or more) underlying s. When portmanteaus shorten es ...
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Altair BASIC
Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASIC was the start of the Microsoft BASIC product range. Origin and development Bill Gates recalls that, when he and Paul Allen read about the Altair in the January 1975 issue of ''Popular Electronics'', they understood that the price of computers would soon drop to the point that selling software for them would be a profitable business. "While walking through Harvard Square one day, Allen spotted the Popular Electronics cover that features the Altair. ... Allen ran to tell Bill that he thought their big break had finally come. Bill agreed." Gates believed that, by providing a BASIC interpreter for the new computer, they could make it more attractive to hobbyists. They contacted MITS founder Ed Roberts, told him that they were developing ...
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Monte Davidoff
Monte Davidoff (; born 1956) is an American computer programmer. Davidoff is from Glendale, Wisconsin. He graduated from Nicolet High School in 1974, and went on to Harvard College, where he majored in applied mathematics, the department at Harvard that, at the time, included computer science. Davidoff also worked at WHRB, the college radio station, and graduated from Harvard in 1978. A college dormmate of Bill Gates who had a summer job at Gates's new company Microsoft during college, Davidoff is best known for writing the Microsoft Binary Format floating-point arithmetic routines for Altair BASIC while he was at Harvard. The routines were subsequently reused in Microsoft BASIC products for other systems. He later worked at Honeywell Information Systems on the Multics project, Tandem Computers, Ready Systems, and Stratus Computer. Since 2000 he has consulted through his own company, Alluvial Software. See also *Microsoft Binary Format References External linksAlluvial Softw ...
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Micro Instrumentation And Telemetry Systems
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) was an American electronics company founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico that began manufacturing electronic calculators in 1971 and personal computers in 1975. Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims founded MITS in December 1969 to produce miniaturized telemetry modules for model rockets such as a roll rate sensor.The editor describes the first MITS modules with photo of the units. In 1971, Roberts redirected the company into the electronic calculator market and the MITS 816 desktop calculator kit was featured on the November 1971 cover of ''Popular Electronics''. The calculators were very successful and sales topped one million dollars in 1973. A brutal calculator price war left the company deeply in debt by 1974. Roberts then developed the first commercially successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which was featured on the January 1975 cover of ''Popular Electronics''. Hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for the $397 computer kit. Paul ...
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DOC (computing)
.doc (an abbreviation of "document") is a filename extension used for word processing documents stored on Microsoft's proprietary Microsoft Word Binary File Format. Microsoft has used the extension since 1983. Microsoft Word Binary File Format Binary DOC files often contain more text formatting information (as well as scripts and undo information) than some other document file formats like Rich Text Format and Hypertext Markup Language, but are usually less widely compatible. The DOC files created with Microsoft Word versions differ. Microsoft Word versions before Word 97 ("8.0") used a different format from the OLE and CFBF-based Microsoft Word 97 – 2003. In Microsoft Word 2007 and later, the binary file format was replaced as the default format by the Office Open XML format, though Microsoft Word can still produce DOC files. Application support The DOC format is native to Microsoft Word. Other word processors, such as OpenOffice.org Writer, IBM Lotus Symphony, Apple ...
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BASIC
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. In addition to the program language, Kemeny and Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), which allowed multiple users to edit and run BASIC programs simultaneously on remote terminals. This general model became very popular on minicomputer systems like the PDP-11 and Data General Nova in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hewlett-Packard produced an entire computer line for this method of operation, introducing the HP2000 series in the late 1960s and continuing sales into the 1980s. Many early video games trace their ...
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