the world's leading software-producing company, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, and founded by William Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. Among its early products were BASIC and MS-DOS (marketed to IBM for use in its computers as PC-DOS). For further information see https://www.microsoft.com.
the world's leading software-producing company, headquartered in Redmond,Washington, and founded byWilliam Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 when they wrote a version of BASIC for an early hobbyist microcomputer, the Altair. In the late 1970s the company grew as it sold versions of BASIC to other computer makers, but it was still fairly small when it was approached by IBM to design the operating system for the IBM PC (released in 1981). This operating system (known as PC-DOS, MS-DOS, or simply DOS) became a huge seller, since almost all PC and PC clones used it. In 1990 Microsoft released version 3.0 of Windows, providing a graphical user interface for the PC. Updated versions of Windows continue to be the most common operating system on the PC (see Windows).
For further information about Microsoft and its products, see www.microsoft.com.
