By Catherina Gioino
Publication Date: 2026-03-13 07:08:00
It began with a simple magazine cover, and then involved into one of the most valuable companies on the planet with technology that is used in virtually every part of daily life.
In January 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen spotted the Altair 8800 personal computer on the front of Popular Electronics and saw something most people didn’t: a machine desperately in need of software. That realization became Microsoft, a portmanteau of “microprocessors” and “software,” sometimes hyphenated in its earliest days as “Micro-Soft.” What started as a two-person operation in Albuquerque, New Mexico would, over the next five decades, reshape how the entire world not only works, but communicates, plays, and builds.
Now, 40 years to the day since the company went public in 1986, many investors are riding on a high never-before-envisioned for a simple concept that came from that magazine cover decades earlier.
How Microsoft took the world by storm
Microsoft’s…
