Source Code

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

After the success of the Altair demonstration, Gates and Allen agreed to sign a licensing deal with the manufacturer called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). They learned that hundreds of customers had already ordered the microcomputer and were also likely to order their software. The pair decided to officially form a company, which they called “Micro-Soft” because they were writing software for microcomputers. When Gates shared the good news with his classmates at Harvard, he was warned to stop using the Harvard PDP-10. Because the computer was funded by DARPA for research purposes, it could not be used for commercial products. Gates registered with a computer timesharing company in the suburbs and transferred his work there. Meanwhile, Allen was given a job at MITS.

In May, Gates was summoned by the associate director of the Aiken Lab to discuss his work. The associate director admonished Gates for the amount of time he spent in the lab, the fact that he brought in unauthorized users (Allen and Monte Davidoff), and the fact that Gates was working on a commercial product. He escalated Gates’s case to the Administrative Board, threatening Gates with expulsion.