As Microsoft turns 50, Bill Gates is celebrating the milestone by doing something both nostalgic and rare—sharing the source code that helped launch the company. Meanwhile, Melinda French Gates is preparing to share her reflections with a new book offering deeply personal insights into the unraveling of their marriage.
On his Gates Notes blog, Bill Gates posted a piece of digital history: the source code that started it all. The code in question? Altair BASIC—the very first product Gates and Paul Allen built for the Altair 8800, the computer that ignited their passion for software. “The coolest code I’ve ever written,” Gates called it, sharing a photo of himself holding the original printed version like a trophy from the past.
It all began in January 1975, when Popular Electronics magazine featured the Altair 8800 on its cover. The computer, developed by a small company called MITS, sparked Gates and Allen’s imaginations. At just 19, Gates—then a student at Harvard—and his childhood friend Paul Allen contacted MITS, claiming they had a version of the programming language BASIC ready to run on the Altair’s chip.
“There was just one problem,” Gates wrote. “We didn’t.”
With little more than ambition and a deadline, the two coded relentlessly for two months to create the software they had promised. When they finally presented it to MITS, the company agreed to license the code. Thus, Altair BASIC became the first product of a brand-new company: Micro-Soft. As Gates noted, “We later dropped the hyphen.”
That moment would become the foundation of Microsoft’s rise, shaping modern computing as we know it. Today, Gates reflects on the journey with pride. “Computer programming has come a long way over the last 50 years,” he wrote, “but I’m still super proud of how it turned out.” Fans of tech history can now download the original code from his blog.
While Bill looks back, Melinda French Gates is preparing to look inward. Her new book, The Next Day, set to release on April 15, delves into the emotional turbulence that led to the couple’s 2021 divorce after 27 years of marriage.
In excerpts shared by People magazine, Melinda opens up about having recurring nightmares in 2019—visions of a beautiful house collapsing around her, night after night. These dreams, she explains, symbolized the inner turmoil she was experiencing as her marriage began to fracture.
She acknowledges what Bill Gates has publicly admitted—that he had not always been faithful. But she also shares her discomfort with his meetings with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a relationship that Bill has since described as one he regrets.
Eventually, the nightmares shifted into something more profound. In one dream, she saw her family perched on the edge of a cliff, and she was falling into a vast void. “I knew, in that moment, that I was going to have to make a decision—and that I was going to have to make it by myself,” she writes.
The Next Day appears to be both a memoir and a message of empowerment—a personal story about recognizing when it’s time to step away, even from something that once felt unshakable.
