We think you know pretty darn well who Microsoft is, but in case you don’t know all the details, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company’s first product was a version of the popular computer language called BASIC for an early microcomputer called the Altair 8800. But the company really emerged out of the shadows in the 1980s when it was contracted by IBM to create a version of the DOS operating system for the original IBM Personal Computer.