Tag Archives: Microsoft

Real Idea Men

It is one of the biggest corporations in the world, with yearly revenues greater than the gross domestic products of 169 countries. Not bad for a company that was co-founded by two young nerds on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell software on computers. They didn’t have much money then.

In fact, one of those guys who arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico airport from Boston in 1975, didn’t have enough money to afford the “upscale” moderately priced motel the computer manufacturer who was interested in buying this software had reserved for this nerd while he proved that his software worked on their computer. He was very nervous about the software — everything was riding on the code — which was punched onto a small role of paper computer tape he carried with him. But, it worked the first time, largely because they had used an emulator of the computer (a software program written by this guy) to build and test the code back in Boston.

This guy, although he didn’t have much money at the time, he did have a big idea. Now others had similar ideas,which was to sell software for computers. That wasn’t the big idea. He and his co-founder shared a firm belief in this big idea, but they were a little different in personality.

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