Microsoft Foundation

On April 4, 1975, two American computer geeks namely Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Gates was attending Harvard University as a Law student, but however his love for computers never faded and he spent most of his time in the computer centre where he improved his programming skills.

Soon, his childhood friend Allen left for Boston and convinced Gates to work together on their project.

They produced an interpreter for the microcomputer Altair 8800 using BASIC programming language, which Gates showed to MITS and they agreed to distribute this product under the name of Altair BASIC.

This deal inspired both of them to make their own company named Micro-Soft.

Gates used the name "Micro-Soft" suggested by his friend Allen mixing "Microcomputer" and "Software". Their first logo was created by themselves using their own programming language. It's made up of their company's name and its groovy style represent the early 70s well, as shown below.

They later developed other operating systems such as MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) which was designed for IBM and made a fortune out of it.

They later changed their logo design and used it for 20 years approximately. This logo has been designed by Scott Baker and it was supposed to represent the new generation of computing.

It consists of the name and this time he used a Helvetica italic typeface font and added a slash between the "o" and the "s" which illustrates speed and motion, refer to the picture below.

Later they designed operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 which are nowadays the most popular operating system and is being used in most computers and laptops. It has a graphical user interface which included drop down menus, scroll bars and other features to ease user access and good looking aesthetics.

They re-designed their logo in 2012 and they claimed that it was a year of their rebirth, and released new operating systems such as Windows 8 and Windows 10 which is their latest version to this date. Their new logo is very simple, consist of 2 components, the logotype and the symbol. The logotype is made from the Segoe font which they also use for their other marketing products and their websites. And the symbol which represents their variety of products.

• The red block represents PowerPoint or the Office Suite
• The green block represents Microsoft Gaming console, the Xbox
• The blue block represents slick and quick, yet cool and easy on the eye.
• The yellow block represents bold and strong, long-lasting and efficient.