---
title: "Which came first, McDonald's or Microsoft?"
description: "McDonald's vs Microsoft: McDonald's came first, by 35 years — 1940 against 1975. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/mcdonalds-vs-microsoft/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, McDonald's or Microsoft?

**Which came first, McDonald's or Microsoft?: McDonald's**

1940 — 35 years before Microsoft

McDonald's came first, by 35 years. Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a restaurant in San Bernardino.

## Side by side

|  | McDonald's | Microsoft |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1940 | 1975 |
| Date | — | 1975-04-04 |
| Category | company | company |
| What happened | Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a restaurant in San Bernardino. | Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. |

## McDonald's

The brothers opened in 1940 as a barbecue drive-in and reinvented it in 1948 with the Speedee Service System — a tiny menu, no waiters, food assembled on a production line. The company itself dates its founding to 15 April 1955, when Ray Kroc opened his franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois. Both dates are defensible and the corporate one is not the restaurant one.

## 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, McDonald's or Microsoft?

McDonald's, by 35 years — 1940 against 1975.

### When did McDonald's start?

1940. Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a restaurant in San Bernardino.

### When did Microsoft start?

1975. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

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## Sources

- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place (/about/)
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]