Bill Gates Makes Microsoft's Source Code Public

The Microsoft co-founder reflected on the company's early years on his Gates Notes blog on April 2nd in honour of the company's 50th anniversary this year. Although Gates has undoubtedly written a lot of code over the past 50 years, he referred to this as "the coolest code I've ever written". Further, he posted a picture of himself with the code displayed on a massive stack of paper. According to Gates, the cover image of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine, which showed the Altair 8800—a groundbreaking personal computer made by a little business named MITS—inspired him. The developers of Altair were contacted by 19-year-old Gates and his Harvard friend Paul Allen, who informed them that they had a BASIC programming language for the microprocessor that powered the Altair 8800. The Altair could be programmed using such software.

How Microsoft came into Existence?

For two months, Gates and his friends worked around the clock coding the software they said already existed. After Gates and Allen showed the code to the MITS president, the software was licensed. According to Gates, their new business, which they chose to name Micro-Soft, released Altair BASIC as its debut product. Gate added that the hyphen was eventually eliminated later. The rest, as they say, is the history of software. That 50-year-old code is available for download from Gates' post. He went on to say that although computer programming has advanced significantly over the past 50 years, he is still quite pleased with the final product.

'The Next Day' by Melinda Gates

Melinda French Gates, Gates's ex-wife, was also in the news on April 2 since her new book, The Next Day, will be releasing on April 15. She is talking candidly about the dissolution of her marriage to Gates as that date draws near. After 27 years together and three kids, the couple were separated in 2021. Melinda French Gates claimed in her book that she was "having nightmares about a beautiful house collapsing all around her — and then waking up in a panic night after night" in 2019. She said she was troubled by Bill Gates's meetings with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and agreed with his public admission that he wasn't always faithful in the marriage.

Since then, Bill Gates has expressed regret over his encounter with Epstein. Eventually, Melinda French Gates claimed that her nightmares would transform into pictures of her family perched on a cliff edge, where she "plummeted" into nothingness. According to media reports, she wrote, "I knew, in that moment, that I was going to have to make a decision — and that I was going to have to make it by myself."