Who co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975?

Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975.

The two had been friends since attending Lakeside School in Seattle, where they developed their programming skills on computer terminals. Their opportunity came after the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800, an early commercially successful microcomputer. Gates and Allen saw that the machine needed software and decided to create a version of the BASIC programming language for it.

They contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, the Altair’s manufacturer, and offered a demonstration before they had actually written the interpreter. Working intensely over several weeks, they produced an emulator and Altair BASIC. The successful demonstration led to a distribution agreement and helped launch their company.

Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Allen coined the original name “Micro-Soft,” combining “microcomputer” and “software.” Steve Ballmer joined later, in 1980, and eventually succeeded Gates as CEO; Satya Nadella became CEO much later, in 2014. Steve Jobs was Apple’s co-founder, not Microsoft’s.