Bill Gates Celebrates Microsoft’s 50th by Releasing Altair BASIC Source Code

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the company in the most Bill Gates way possible: He’s releasing the source code he wrote for Altair BASIC, the company’s “original source code.”

“Before there was Office or Windows 95 or Xbox or AI, there was Altair BASIC,” Bill Gates writes on his Gates Notes website. “In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new ways to make life easier and work more productive. Making it 50 years is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn’t have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella, along with the many people who have worked at Microsoft over the years.”

The Gates source code release comes on the heels of the release of the first of three Bill Gates autobiographies, appropriately titled Source Code: My Beginnings. I (re)told the story of the original Altair BASIC after reading that book–and re-reading Paul Allen’s autobiography, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft–and it stands as an incredible Genesis story for the PC industry.

Today, Gates says that the 50th anniversary of Microsoft is “bittersweet,” and that it feels like yesterday when he and Allen “hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard’s computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company.” That code, he says, remains “the coolest code I’ve ever written to this day …. I still get a kick out of seeing it, even all these years later.”

And now you can see it for yourself: The printout is over 150 pages of Intel 8080 assembly language.