Microsoft company's shares reach its highest value since December 1999. In 2018, Microsoft surpassed Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world after being dethroned by the tech giant in 2010. Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business utilizing their shared skills in computer programming. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data. While Gates enrolled at Harvard, Allen pursued a degree in computer science at Washington State University, though he later dropped out of school to work at Honeywell.
Barbarians Led by Bill Gates Barbarians Led by Bill Gates Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside is a book that was jointly written by Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller, an American programmer who was a manager and a software developer at Microsoft Corporation from 1982–95, and development lead for the Graphics Device Interface (GDI) of Windows 1.0 and also for Pen Windows. Written as a third-person account of Eller's experiences at Microsoft, it goes into detail about the early years of Microsoft and its emergence as a massive corporation. Two chapters of the book deal specifically with the business contacts between Microsoft