By Laura Rodini
Publication Date: 2026-04-23 00:38:00
Bill Gates may be the iconic face of Microsoft (MSFT), but he isn’t solely responsible for the company’s groundbreaking achievements — those were driven by a global team of highly skilled and dedicated workers.
The original Windows 1.0 team, for instance, was a small and scrappy group of 20-something developers who, in 1983, built the platform out of Microsoft’s Bellevue, Washington, office, often staying up all night and figuring things out as they went along.
These workers reunited in 2025 for a 40-year reunion, joined by Microsoft’s former CEO and Windows 1.0 project leader, Steve Ballmer, but the reunion itself was only made possible by a hidden Easter egg the team had embedded in the software — an internal credits list that took decades to uncover.
Engineers and developers have always been a core part of Microsoft’s business, but as the company has evolved, their roles have pivoted. Programmers started out coding in Visual Basic and C++ during the…
