---
title: "Which came first, Microsoft or Windows?"
description: "Microsoft vs Windows: Microsoft came first, by 10 years — 1975 against 1985. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/microsoft-vs-windows/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Microsoft or Windows?

**Which came first, Microsoft or Windows?: Microsoft**

1975 — 10 years before Windows

Microsoft came first, by 10 years. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

## Side by side

|  | Microsoft | Windows |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1975 | 1985 |
| Date | 1975-04-04 | 1985-11-20 |
| Category | company | technology |
| What happened | Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. | Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0. |

## 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.

## Windows

Windows 1.0 shipped in November 1985, twenty-two months after the Macintosh, and it was not an operating system — it was a graphical shell running on top of MS-DOS, and remained so until Windows NT in 1993 and the consumer transition with Windows XP in 2001. Version 1.0 could not even overlap windows: they tiled, because Apple's legal position on overlapping windows was unresolved.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Microsoft or Windows?

Microsoft, by 10 years — 1975 against 1985.

### When did Microsoft start?

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

### When did Windows start?

1985. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]