60 Fun Facts About Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and which childhood friend?

Paul Allen, who had known Gates since their Seattle school days, had already run Traf-O-Data with him, selling a rudimentary computer for analysing road-traffic counts.

The company's name, first written with a hyphen, was coined by a co-founder from what two words?

A co-founder coined 'Micro-Soft' as a blend of micro-computer software; the hyphen went when the name was registered in New Mexico in 1976, and the company was formally established on April 4, 1975, with Gates as CEO.

Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter for which early microcomputer?

Altair BASIC was written for the MITS Altair 8800; Gates told MITS he had a working interpreter before writing a line of code, yet the March 1975 demonstration worked flawlessly.

In which city was Microsoft based when it demonstrated Altair BASIC in 1975?

MITS, the microcomputer maker that licensed its BASIC, was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so Microsoft set up there in 1975; the company moved to the Seattle area in January 1979.

Microsoft's headquarters are in which Washington city?

The move from Bellevue to Redmond came on February 26, 1986, weeks before the company's stock market debut.

MS-DOS began life as a product Microsoft bought from Seattle Computer Products called what?

Tim Paterson's 86-DOS (originally QDOS) was bought for about $75,000 in all in 1981; IBM wanted a CP/M-style system for its PC, and Microsoft crucially kept the right to license the rebranded MS-DOS to others.

Microsoft's first operating system, released in 1980 before MS-DOS, was a licensed version of what?

Called Xenix, it was licensed from AT&T a year earlier.

Windows 1.0 was released on November 20 of which year?

Windows 1.0 shipped on November 20, 1985, as a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS, two years after its announcement; Microsoft was simultaneously co-developing OS/2 with IBM.

Microsoft's 1986 stock market debut is estimated to have made how many employees millionaires?

The rise in the stock after its NASDAQ listing on March 13, 1986, is estimated to have made about 12,000 employees millionaires and four of them billionaires.

Gates's co-founder left day-to-day work at the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with what?

The diagnosis was Hodgkin's lymphoma, treated with radiation; he recovered and went on to own the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers, dying in 2018 of complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Bill Gates dropped out of which university to build Microsoft?

Gates enrolled at Harvard in 1973 and took Math 55, the notoriously hard freshman course, before leaving in 1975 to work on Microsoft full-time.

At which private Seattle academy did the two founders meet and first get access to a computer?

Lakeside School's Mothers' Club bought time on a Teletype terminal in 1968, and the two future founders, two school years apart, taught themselves programming on it.

The company's text-editing application was first released in 1983 under what longer title?

Multi-Tool Word, renamed Microsoft Word soon after its 1983 debut, was developed by Charles Simonyi, hired from Xerox PARC; free demo copies on floppy were bundled with PC World magazine.

Bill Gates announced Excel in 1985 at a joint press conference with which rival?

Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple unveiled Excel together in New York that May because the first versions ran only on the Macintosh; the aim was to beat Lotus 1-2-3, which had crushed Microsoft's earlier Multiplan.

Microsoft bought PowerPoint in 1987, for about $14 million, from which company?

Forethought Inc. of Sunnyvale, whose Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin had created the program, sold it to Microsoft in July 1987; the first version ran only on Macintosh and was designed for producing overhead transparencies.

In which year did Microsoft Office first appear for Windows?

Office for Windows arrived in 1990, a year after the Macintosh bundle, and Windows 3.0 launched the same year; both products became dominant in their fields.

Which Rolling Stones song did the Windows 95 launch campaign use, a nod to the new button?

'Start Me Up' ran in the Windows 95 television ads as a nod to the new Start button; the Rolling Stones took a reported multimillion-dollar fee, and the New York Times called it the splashiest product launch in industry history.

Windows 95 introduced long file names of up to how many characters?

Windows 95's VFAT file system allowed file names of up to 255 characters, ending the MS-DOS 8.3 limit, while keeping a short alias for older programs.

Microsoft Bob, the cartoon-house interface released in March 1995, featured which animated guide?

Rover the dog was the default guide around the cartoon house; the product was discontinued in early 1996 and is regularly listed among the worst products in tech history.

Comic Sans was drawn to replace which typeface in Microsoft Bob's cartoon speech bubbles?

Vincent Connare saw a 1994 Microsoft Bob beta in which cartoon characters spoke in Times New Roman speech bubbles and drew Comic Sans, modelled on comic-book lettering, as a friendlier substitute.

The animated Office Assistant everyone calls Clippy is officially named what?

The paperclip's official name was Clippit, one of several Office Assistants alongside a cat, a dog and a robot; it became a byword for annoying software and was switched off by default in Office XP.

Windows Solitaire, included since Windows 3.0 in 1990, was programmed by whom?

An intern named Wes Cherry wrote Solitaire in 1989 and was never paid royalties for it; Susan Kare, who drew the original Macintosh icons, designed the card deck.

Windows XP's default wallpaper Bliss was photographed in 1996 in which region?

Charles O'Rear, a former National Geographic photographer, shot the hill on the road between Napa and Sonoma, California, on medium-format Velvia film, which is why the greens are so vivid.

Windows XP was released on October 25 of which year?

Windows XP went on sale on October 25, 2001, unifying the consumer and NT lines on the NT codebase; the first Xbox followed three weeks later.

Bill Gates handed the CEO job to Steve Ballmer in January 2000 and took what new title for himself?

Gates became Chief Software Architect, a title he held until Ray Ozzie took it in 2006, while remaining chairman; Ballmer, an old college friend who had joined in 1980, took over as CEO.

Before joining Microsoft, Steve Ballmer worked as an assistant product manager at which company?

At Procter & Gamble he shared an office with Jeff Immelt, later CEO of General Electric; he then tried screenwriting in Hollywood and attended Stanford's business school before joining Microsoft in 1980.

Which NBA franchise did Steve Ballmer buy in 2014?

Ballmer paid a then-record $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014, months after stepping down as Microsoft CEO in February that year.

The original Xbox launched in November 2001 alongside which game, its signature title?

Halo: Combat Evolved shipped with the console on launch day, November 15; Microsoft had bought its developer, Bungie, in June 2000 and turned the game into the Xbox's flagship launch title.

The idea for the Xbox came from four engineers on which Microsoft team?

The name is a nod to DirectX; the console was designed to compete with Sony's PlayStation 2.

Microsoft's motion-sensing camera controller, first released in November 2010, was called what?

Kinect launched for the Xbox 360 on November 4, 2010, and sold eight million units in its first 60 days; an upgraded version was bundled with the Xbox One in 2013.

Microsoft's Zune, launched in 2006, was made in cooperation with which Japanese company?

The first Zune was built with Toshiba, whose Gigabeat S player it was based on; the hardware was dropped in 2011 and the brand retired in 2012, having never seriously dented the iPod's lead.

Microsoft's 2010 Windows Phone interface used a flat design language codenamed what?

Metro, the flat typography-led style of Windows Phone 7, spread across Microsoft's logos, the Xbox dashboard and Windows 8 in 2011 and 2012 before the name was dropped over a trademark dispute.

In 2011 the company made its then-largest acquisition, buying which communications app for $8.5 billion?

Skype was shut down in May 2025 so Microsoft could focus on Teams.

The Surface, unveiled in June 2012, was notable as the company's first what?

Surface was Microsoft's first PC with hardware built in-house, designed by its own team rather than by Windows partners such as Dell and HP; the Xbox had been its only earlier computer-class device.

Which company's mobile phone business did Microsoft buy in a deal announced in 2013?

Nokia's devices and services unit became Microsoft Mobile in 2014; within two years Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion and laid off 7,800 people.

Satya Nadella became Microsoft's CEO on February 4, 2014, having previously led which division?

Nadella had run the Cloud and Enterprise group, earlier called Server and Tools, before taking over from Ballmer on February 4, 2014; born in Hyderabad in 1967, he refocused the company on cloud computing.

Which game studio, maker of Minecraft, did Microsoft buy in September 2014 for $2.5 billion?

Mojang, the Stockholm studio behind Minecraft, was bought in September 2014 for $2.5 billion; Minecraft went on to become the best-selling video game of all time, passing 300 million copies in 2023.

Minecraft was originally created in Java by which Swedish developer?

Jens Bergensten took over development after the full release; Persson had previously worked at the browser-game maker King.

Which professional networking site did the company buy in 2016 for $26.2 billion?

LinkedIn was bought in December 2016 for $26.2 billion, then the company's largest purchase, and kept running as a largely independent unit under its own chief executive.

How long after its March 2016 launch was Microsoft's chatbot Tay shut down for offensive tweets?

Tay was pulled about 16 hours after going live on March 23, 2016, once trolls had taught it to post racist tweets; the name stood for 'thinking about you' and it was billed as 'the AI with zero chill'.

Which rival operating system did Steve Ballmer call a 'cancer' in 2001?

Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation in November 2016 at $500,000 a year, a move analysts had once deemed unthinkable.

Which code-hosting platform did Microsoft buy in 2018 for $7.5 billion?

The GitHub deal was announced on June 4 and closed on October 26, 2018, paid in Microsoft stock; GitHub kept operating independently under new chief executive Nat Friedman.

Microsoft became the third US public company valued at over $1 trillion in which year?

Microsoft first closed above $1 trillion in April 2019, after Apple and Amazon in 2018, and went on to pass $2 trillion in June 2021 on pandemic-era cloud and gaming demand.

In 2021 a new OS version caused confusion because its maker had earlier called which version the last ever?

A Microsoft developer evangelist had said in 2015 that Windows 10 would be 'the last version of Windows', so Windows 11's arrival on October 5, 2021 surprised many.

The company's biggest acquisition, completed in 2023, was which game publisher for $68.7 billion?

Activision Blizzard, maker of Call of Duty, was absorbed on October 13, 2023 after a 21-month regulatory fight; Phil Spencer heads the Microsoft Gaming division that also houses ZeniMax and Xbox Game Studios.

The company's cloud computing platform, a rival to Amazon Web Services, is called what?

Azure, announced as Windows Azure in 2008 and launched in February 2010, runs on Microsoft's own data centres; the Cobalt CPU and Maia AI chip unveiled in 2023 were designed for it.

Microsoft announced a multi-billion-dollar deal in January 2023 with which ChatGPT developer?

The January 2023 deal extended Microsoft's OpenAI investment to a reported $10 billion; that November Microsoft announced it would hire OpenAI's ousted CEO Sam Altman, only for him to be reinstated within days.

Which 24-hour cable news channel did Microsoft co-found with NBC in 1996?

MSNBC launched on July 15, 1996 as a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC; NBC took control of the channel in 2005 by buying most of Microsoft's stake, and the msnbc.com website partnership ended in July 2012.

The EU's 2004 fine forced the company to sell XP editions stripped of which program?

The European Commission's March 2004 ruling, with a 497 million euro fine, required Windows XP Home Edition N and Professional N to ship without Windows Media Player.

Bill Gates's internal 1995 memo that turned the company toward the web was titled what?

Gates's 'Internet Tidal Wave' memo, dated May 26, 1995, gave the internet 'the highest level of importance' and named Netscape as the chief threat; it is credited with letting Microsoft catch the web early.

The company's first international office, opened in the late 1970s, was in which country?

The first office abroad was ASCII Microsoft in Japan, born of a 1977 agreement with Kazuhiko Nishi's ASCII Magazine; Nishi went on to become Microsoft's vice-president for the Far East.

Which hardware product, released in 1983 with its new publishing arm, was one of Microsoft's first non-software items?

The mouse arrived two years before Windows 1.0 gave people much reason to use one.

Which security firm's faulty update caused the July 2024 global Windows outage?

A defective CrowdStrike Falcon sensor update on July 19, 2024 crashed about 8.5 million Windows machines; its CEO stressed it was not a cyberattack, but flights, payments and hospitals were disrupted for days.

Which company did Microsoft license its first browser from to create Internet Explorer?

Spyglass later disputed the deal: it was owed a royalty per copy sold, but Microsoft never sold a copy, bundling the browser free with Windows.

What was the codename of Windows Vista during its early development?

Vista was developed as Longhorn for more than five years, including a 2004 reset; it reached consumers on January 30, 2007, and was criticised for the horsepower its Aero theme and desktop gadgets demanded.

Microsoft's short-lived Kin phones of 2010 grew out of its 2008 purchase of which company?

Danger Incorporated, maker of the T-Mobile Sidekick, was bought in February 2008 and its team built the Kin; the phones went on sale on May 14, 2010 and were discontinued within two months because of poor sales.

Which speech-recognition company did Microsoft agree to buy for about $16 billion in 2021?

Nuance Communications, whose Dragon dictation software is widely used in hospitals, was bought for about $16 billion (nearly $20 billion with debt) in a deal that closed in March 2022.

How many units did the original Xbox sell, beating the GameCube but trailing the PS2?

The original Xbox sold about 24 million units, against 155 million for the PS2 and 21 million for the GameCube; the Xbox 360 later reached 84 million but was edged by the PS3's 87 million.

Which 1983 home computer standard did Microsoft and ASCII Corporation create with numerous hardware partners?

MSX, devised by Microsoft and Kazuhiko Nishi's ASCII in 1983 and built by Sony, Panasonic, Philips and others, ran MSX-DOS; the machines sold well in Asia, Europe and South America while IBM PC clones took the US.

Which judge ordered Microsoft split in two in June 2000 in the US antitrust case?

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft split into an operating-system company and an applications company on June 7, 2000; an appeals court overturned the breakup the next year and a settlement was approved in 2002.