Microsoft's IPO in 1986: When Bill Gates aimed to put a microphone in every room
Story Dreaming of equipping every home in the world with a computer running Microsoft software, the boss of the Redmond firm hardly bothers with morality.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, in San Francisco in 1991. ED KASHI/VII/REDUX-REA
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In the 1960s, when he was a student at Lakeside School, a suburb of Seattle, little "Trey" already displayed absolute confidence: "He was annoying, self-assured, he was aggressively intelligent and intimidating," recalls a classmate (in "Hard Drive," by James Wallace, untranslated, 1993). Intelligent? On this point, we have to defend Bill "Trey" Gates. By hating Microsoft, many have come to see it as nothing more than an empire built on luck and dirty tricks.
The story goes like this: in the early 1980s, Microsoft was just a small company that had invented a programming language, Basic, and bought DOS, a mediocre operating system (the software that makes computers "run,") for $50,000. Luckily, IBM chose…
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