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Which came first, LEGO or Microsoft?

Which came first, LEGO or Microsoft?
LEGO
1932 — 43 years before Microsoft

LEGO came first, by 43 years. Ole Kirk Christiansen started making wooden toys in Billund.

Side by side

LEGO Microsoft
Year 1932 1975
Date 1975-04-04
Category company company
What happened Ole Kirk Christiansen started making wooden toys in Billund. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

LEGO

The company began in 1932 making wooden toys; the name comes from leg godt, Danish for "play well". The interlocking plastic brick in its modern form was patented on 28 January 1958, and the tolerances have been held so precisely since that a brick made that day still clutches a brick made today. LEGO is now the largest tyre manufacturer in the world by unit count.

Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in April 1975 to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 — a product they had demonstrated before writing all of it. It predates Apple by almost exactly one year. The hyphen was dropped in 1976 and the company moved to Washington state in 1979.

Common questions

Which came first, LEGO or Microsoft?
LEGO, by 43 years — 1932 against 1975.
When did LEGO start?
1932. Ole Kirk Christiansen started making wooden toys in Billund.
When did Microsoft start?
1975. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked