Bill Gates Shares Original Altair BASIC Code to Celebrate Microsoft’s 50th Anniversary

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has shared the original source code that helped launch the tech giant. To celebrate Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, Gates posted the code on his Gates Notes blog, describing it as ‘the coolest code’ he ever wrote. Inspired by a 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featuring the Altair 8800, Gates and his Harvard friend Paul Allen claimed they had developed a BASIC programming language for the new computer—though they hadn’t yet. They worked intensively for two months to create the program, which would become Altair BASIC, Microsoft’s first official product. The company’s original name was ‘Micro-Soft,’ later changed to Microsoft. Gates shared a nostalgic photo of himself holding printed pages of the code and expressed pride in the project’s outcome. In related news, Melinda French Gates, Bill’s former wife, is preparing for the release of her book, ‘The Next Day,’ where she discusses the dissolution of her marriage and her emotional struggles, including Gates’s admitted infidelities and ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Readers can now download the historic code from Gates’s blog post, marking an important milestone in computing history.