Even in his older age, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has a long and fond memory of the computer code he wrote 50 years ago that helped open a new era in technology. While he printed that code out on a teletype machine and it may seem crude compared to what flyers today's artificial intelligence (AI) platforms are running on, it was an important part of Microsoft being founded in April 1975. You can find both Gates and Microsoft acknowledging that 50 year anniversary on Friday. Back when it was all happening, 69-year-old Gates set the stage for the party with a blog post reflecting on how he and his former high school friend - the late Paul Allen - scrambled to create the world's first "software factory" after reading an article in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine about the Altair 8800, a minicomputer driven by a tiny chip from a then-little-known technology company, Intel.

The article motivated Gates, a freshman at Harvard University, and Allen to reach out to Altair's manufacturer, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, and assure the company's CEO Ed Roberts they had created software that would give consumers control of the hardware. There was just one issue: Gates and Allen had yet to actually come up with the code they further promised Roberts.

Gates and Allen got around the obstacle by latching onto BASIC computer language developed back in 1964 at Dartmouth College, but they needed to find a way to make the software work with the yet-to-be-produced computer Altair—without a prototype of the machine. After two months of work, and hardly any sleep at all, Gates finished the code that would be the basis of the first operating system for the Altair. “That code is still the coolest thing I have ever written” wrote Gates, on his blog post that even includes a download option of the original program.