Which came first, the Macintosh or Microsoft?
Which came first, the Macintosh or Microsoft?
Microsoft
1975 — 9 years before the Macintosh
Microsoft came first, by 9 years. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.
Side by side
| the Macintosh | Microsoft | |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1984 | 1975 |
| Date | 1984-01-24 | 1975-04-04 |
| Category | technology | company |
| What happened | Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert. | Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. |
the Macintosh
The Macintosh launched in January 1984 with a graphical interface and a mouse, and beat Windows to market by almost two years. Neither invented the idea — Xerox PARC had built the Alto in 1973, and both Apple and Microsoft were working from what they had seen there. Mac OS X, the ancestor of today's macOS, arrived much later in 2001 and is Unix underneath.
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, the Macintosh or Microsoft?
- Microsoft, by 9 years — 1975 against 1984.
- When did the Macintosh start?
- 1984. Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert.
- When did Microsoft start?
- 1975. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.
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Sources
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)