by Sarah Howell

Created on: July 16, 2009   Last Updated: July 18, 2009

Microsoft is one of the largest, most successful companies in the world, but just like every other company, they had to start somewhere.

Back in 1975, Bill Gates, a nineteen year old kid at the time, and his twenty two year old business partner Paul Allen made the first mark in Microsoft history by selling the program called "BASIC" to a small computer company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. By the year 1975 had passed, Microsoft had made $16,005 from their little computer operating system called BASIC.

When Gates and Allen communicated to each other, Gates referred to their partnership as "Micro-soft", which is where the company's name was derived from. Though it wasn't until a year later, that the name was permanent. At this same time, Microsoft hired their first full-time employee Marc McDonald in hopes of rising the issue of software piracy. Bill Gates was the first software programmer to make an effort to banish illegal copies of software. Gate's anti-piracy hitch made a difference, but even to this day, there is still software pirating going on.

After only one year of programming, Microsoft began to get a lot of attention. Their first advertisement appeared in the magazine Digital Design. Paul Allen resigned from his schooling at MIT to put his full attention to the projects that were going on at Microsoft. Soon, Microsoft became a trademark that was registered on November 26, 1976.

Several years later, Microsoft transformed their $16,005 they were making a year, into an incredible $345,890,000 a year. Achieving this size of profit was helped by the software that they had been distributing including: PageView, Quick C 1.0, Microsoft C Optimizing Compiler, Quick Basic 4.0, XENIX System V/286 2.23, Word 4.0 for DOS, Word 3.0 for XENIX, Macro Assembler 5.0, Chart 3.0, Project 4.0, Word 3.01 for the Mac, OS/2 Software Development Kit, MS-DOS Manager 1.0, BASIC and PASCAL compilers for XENIX System V/286, MS-DOS v 3.3, Quick Basic 3.0, MS-DOS CD-ROM Extensions 1.0, Fortran Optimizing Compiler 4.0, Windows Software Development Kit 1.03, Multiplan 3.0.

After years of creating and releasing useful software, Microsoft started making it big time in 1992 when they released the operating system that would change the way people used computers, Windows 3.x. Windows 3.x allowed computer users to have a graphical interface on their computer, meaning that this is when the mouse was created, goodbye command line.

In 1993, Windows unveiled the next step up the ladder,

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