the Great Calamity, the Great Hunger, the Great Starvation, the Irish Famine - a famine in Ireland resulting from a potato blight; between 1846 and 1851 a million people starved to death and 1.6 million emigrated (most to America)
As of 2011, it was the world's largest software maker by revenue, and one of the world's most valuable companies. Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft has named Satya Nadella as its new CEO and announced that founder Bill Gates will step down as chairman of the company's board. Nadella is a 22-year veteran of Microsoft () who has been overseeing various aspects of the company's corporate software business since 1992. Over the past several years, Nadella's cloud and enterprise division has been one of Microsoft's best-performing units.