25 Awesome Facts About Microsoft

Microsoft is a multinational technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington, United States. It develops, manufactures, licenses supports, and sells Consumer Electronics, Computer Software, Personal Computers, and related services. It was founded on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, by Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen. The company has the spot in the world’s top 5 tech companies: Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

1. Before creating Microsoft, Bill Gates was apparently counting cars. In the 1970s, he started his first business, which was named Traf-o-data. The company uses to read raw data from roadway traffic counters and create meaningful reports for traffic controllers.
2. Microsoft was developed in a garage in Albuquerque garage by Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen, originally named Micro-Soft, for microprocessor and software. The first software they produced was for the Altair 8800, which was the early personal computer.
3. Microsoft made $16,005 in revenue in its first year of operation, that is, in the year 1976.
4. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, was a college dropout from Harvard University.
5. The year in which the first PCs began selling was 1981. IBM distributed the IBM PC, and Microsoft shipped it with Microsoft Basic, which was the foundation software of the company.
6. The first Operating System Microsoft created was Xenix, which was a version of UNIX under a different name and was released in the year 1981.
7. During the 1980s, an IBM computer was not considered to be 100% compatible if it could not run the famous Microsoft Flight Simulator.
8. The most popular OS that turned the tables for Microsoft was MS-DOS. It was originally called as QDOS (Quick and Dirty operating system) and was bought for $75,000 from Paterson. The author of the software was later hired to modify his OS to MS-DOS and was licensed to IBM for its PC as PC-DOS.
9. At the age of 31, bill gates become the youngest billionaire. The record was held from the year 1987 till 2010, when Mark Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire at the age of 23.
10. In 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95, which was sold like a hotcake with millions of copies sold within the first four days of its launch.
11. When Microsoft’s initial public offering (IPO) went public on March 13, 1986, the share price was set to $21.00 per share. The share price on October 17, 1986, was $0.13, and on October 16, 2020, the price of the share was $221.40, so that is an increase of a whopping 170,207.69% in 34 years. So if you have invested $1000 in the year 1986, it would have increased to $1.7 million.
12. The logo of Windows 95 and 98 was created with a freehand on Macintosh Computer.
13. David Bradley, who was an engineer at Microsoft, wrote the code for the [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Delete] key Sequence. He worked on one of the earliest IBM PC’s and also wrote the code for the computers ROM Bios.
14. Microsoft released Internet Explorer in the year 1995. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, which lead to the browse war. By 2002, Internet Explorer became the most dominant web browser with a market share of whooping 95 percent.
15. In the year 2001, Microsoft filed a trademark suit against the website Lindows.com in December. It won the case in early 2004 and paid $20 million for the Lindows trademark. Later Lindows became Linspire Inc.
16. Microsoft Formed a Macintosh Business Unit on January 7, 1997; it was initially composed of over 100 individuals from the existing cross-platform Word, Excel, and PowerPoint teams in Microsoft’s Office Division. Later the number grew to 180 employees the very next year, with the addition of the Internet Explorer for Mac and Outlook Express for Mac.
17. Stinger was the codename by Microsoft, which was used for its smartphone platform that was unveiled in 2001 and was called as windows phone. It was one of the early smartphone software’s that was used on a large scale. However, the operating system is discontinued now.
18. Microsoft started the fashion to use code names for under-development software and systems. For instance, Windows 7 was codenamed “Vienna”.
19. The name of Microsoft’s search engine “Bing” has its origins from the word Bingo. Just like the game, the name of the search engine is meant to suggest that something looked for has been found or realized.
20. It is impossible to create a folder with certain names in any of the Microsoft operating systems. These names are CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9. The reason behind this is that these keywords are reserved for some of the tasks to be performed by the Operating System.
21. The Xbox was originally was titled originally as the Direct X-box, as in 1998, Microsoft decided to build an entire game console around the Direct X.
22. The day after Internet Explorer 4 was released, a few Microsoft employees left a ten by 12-foot Internet Explorer logo on Netscape’s front lawn with a message that said “We love you” at the height of the browser wars in the late 90s.
23. Though the highest possible encryption in Windows 2000 was 128 bit, Microsoft only sent the 40-bit encryption version to India because the country was under US sanctions after Pokhran nuclear test.
24. Windows XP was launched in October 2001, which got very popular. The support of the operating system was discontinued in the year 2014. However, as of 2019, 3.72 percent of total machines are still running on Windows XP.
25. Microsoft has subsequently acquired over 225 companies, purchased stakes in 64 companies, and made 25 divestments. Of the companies that Microsoft has acquired, 107 were based in the United States.