By Louisa Clarence-Smith
Publication Date: 2026-03-12 22:05:00
Anyone who invested $1 in Microsoft when it became a stock market company would have seen a return of 423,908 per cent compared with a 2,705 per cent gain by the S&P 500 over the same period, in an extraordinary corporate journey that started with two high school friends in Seattle falling in love with computers.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who met when they were teenagers, founded Microsoft in 1975 and developed a condensed version of the BASIC programming language for the personal computer.
The company had its first big break in 1980 when IBM asked Microsoft to provide the operating system for its new PC.
When Microsoft was taken public in 1986, the stock price tripled in a year, making Gates a billionaire at the age of 31.
In the early 1980s, Microsoft began working on Windows, a graphical user interface. It faced competition in the software industry from Lotus and WordPerfect, independent software vendors. However, it also recognised the potential of the…