GeekWire November 13, 2024
Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025. Learn more and register here for our Microsoft @ 50 event, March 20, 2025, in Seattle.
Bill Gates needed a coat.
It was November 1980. Ronald Reagan had just defeated Jimmy Carter in the U.S. presidential election. Barely 25 years old, Gates had been running Microsoft for five years with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Steve Ballmer, the future Microsoft CEO, had joined a few months earlier as “Assistant to the President.”
Microsoft had grown to about 50 people since moving to Bellevue, Wash., from Albuquerque in 1979. The IBM Personal Computer was a year away...
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