It was the summer of 1980, and Bill Gates had a problem.

IBM had just asked Gates´ tiny company, Microsoft, to provide an operating system, the software that runs a computer´s basic functions, for its new personal computer project. But Microsoft, which at the time wrote programming languages for microcomputers, didn´t make operating systems.

Luckily, its biggest would-be competitor, Digital Equipment Corp., believed the PC would never take off and decided not to license its operating systems to IBM.

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