Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of Into the Killing.

If you know of any cool cases you want to cover on Into the Killing, please visit our website,

Criblylisted.com, then go to the Suggesticase page.

For this episode, we're going back to April 1975.

On April 4, 1975, two friends from Seattle, Washington, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, founded Microsoft.

Alan and Gates met in high school and bonded over their love of computers.

In early 1975, Alan showed Gates an article in popular mechanics with the Altair 8800 mini-computer kit, manufactured by a small

company, micro-instrumentation and telemetry systems, also known as MITS. At the time, Alan

worked as a programmer at Honeywell and Gates was a student at Harvard. They contacted MITS and told

them they were working on a software program

written with the computer language, beginners all-purpose symbolic instruction code, or basic,

that could run on the Altair. MITS asked for a demonstration. The problem was that Gates

and Allen didn't have an Altair. Nevertheless, they spent two months

writing the software at the computer lab at Harvard. Then Allen took the software to MITS without

testing it, and it worked. After this, on April 4, 1975, Allen and Gates found in Microsoft.

The name is a portmanteau, taking Microsoft from microprocessor and soft from software.

They found the company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where MITS was headquartered. In 1979, Microsoft relocated to Bellevue, Washington.

In 1981, they debuted MS. DOS, which IBM leaves for their first personal computer.

Two years later, Allen stopped his day-to-day work with Microsoft after being diagnosed with

Hodgkin lymphoma, but he remained on the board as vice president.

Allen received treatment, and he survived. In 1985, Microsoft released their new operating system

that would change the world, Windows.

...