Microsoft founder Paul Allen looks back and to the future

Seattle

LOOKING at Microsoft's sprawling product line and 118,000 or so employees, it is easy to forget the company started with one modest product made by two ambitious people.

In early April, one of those two people, Paul Allen, offered a reminder of Microsoft's humble origins when he posted a photograph on Twitter commemorating the company's 40th anniversary. The picture showed the introductory lines of the printed code for Microsoft's first software product, an interpreter for the Basic programming language that Mr Allen created with Bill Gates in 1975.