Micro-Soft Born

The name before the company

Today in 1976, Bill Gates and Paul Allen registered “Micro-Soft” with the Secretary of State of New Mexico.

Gates and Allen recalled in 1995:

Gates: When we signed that first contract with MITS, we referred to ourselves as "Paul Allen and Bill Gates doing business as Micro-Soft.'' I don't remember why we spelled it with a hyphen and a capital "S." We put a credit line in the source code of our first product that said, "Micro-Soft BASIC: Bill Gates wrote a lot of stuff; Paul Allen wrote some other stuff.'' We never officially incorporated until 1981. Allen: We had talked about a lot of different names back in Boston, and at some point I said, "Well, the totally obvious name would be Microsoft." Gates: We also had mentioned names like Outcorporated Inc. and Unlimited Ltd., but we were, you know, joking around. We talked a lot about whether we should call it Allen & Gates, but decided that was not a good idea. Allen: Yeah. Because companies like DEC and IBM weren't named after personalities, they would have a longevity and identity way beyond the founders... Gates: ...and it seemed like a law firm or like a consulting company to call it Allen & Gates. So we picked Microsoft even before we had a company to name.