Beyond MITS

Once released from MITS, Microsoft proceeded to port other languages such as FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal to the 8080 as well as other chips on the market, and as Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) began to grow, so did Microsoft. The company landed deals with Tandy for the TRS-80 and Apple for the Apple II as well as other companies like Commodore, Intel, and Texas Instruments. A plain version of Disk BASIC was selling for $50,000 and, once standardized, could be made in a couple of hours. In addition, Microsoft's market was growing worldwide as the company pushed heavily into Japan. By the time the company moved to Seattle at the end of 1978, Microsoft's yearly revenues were approaching $1 million. The company overcame the inevitable missed deadlines, questionable design issues, and resultant contract revisions that came as a result of their tremendous growth by becoming masters at marketing and salesmanship.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ron Wayne formed Apple Computer in April 1976. A successor to the Apple I, the popular Apple II debuted in April 1977 and easily eclipsed the lackluster sales of its predecessor. The introduction of Software Art's VisiCalc spreadsheet in June of 1979 on the Apple II pushed sales even further. The success of applications like VisiCalc and the word processor WordStar, which had been introduced by MicroPro around the same time, encouraged Gates and Microsoft to begin considering the applications market. It became evident that the applications drove the sales of the machines.

By the end of 1979, Microsoft annual sales were close to $4 million. Still in the primary business of selling languages for the variety of machines coming to market around the world, Microsoft had only just recently entered the applications market. As the industry slowly started to standardize on Microsoft's languages, the same non-Apple industry was starting to coalesce around an operating system called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) being produced by a company called Digital Research.

Microsoft was growing at an amazing rate. However, the future of the company was still uncertain. After all, this was still a fledgling and very unpredictable industry, revolving around multiple hardware platforms. Companies like MITS had risen from anonymity to prominence with meteoric speed, only to fade into obscurity just as quickly. This would all change in 1980 when Microsoft received a call from the bluest of the blue chips, IBM.

MITS and the Altair

The IBM PC