Microsoft's Milestones

This year, Microsoft celebrates its 47th anniversary. Here's a glance at some of the company's biggest achievements in that time.

- JULIAN NABIL

1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft-originally spelt “Micro-soft”—to produce software for the MITS Altair 8800 minicomputer. Five years later, in 1980, the pair inked a deal with IBM to provide an operating system for its first PC. IBM introduced its PC with Microsoft's 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS 1.0, in 1981.

1986 In 1985, Gates rolled out the Microsoft Windows interface for its MS-DOS operating system. The following year, on March 13, 1986, Microsoft went public. Its initial IPO had a $21 offering price, which rose to $35.5 before the a end of the day. On the first day of trading, 2.5 million shares changed hands, raising $61 million.

1995 Microsoft's Windows 95 program unveiled now-iconic features including the desktop, the recycle bin, the start button, and the taskbar. It also added a new "plug and play" feature for installing hardware.

1997 Microsoft purchased Hotmail, one of the world's first webmail services, in 1997, replacing it with Outlook.com six years later.