By 1993, Windows 3.0 and its subsequent versions were selling at a rate of one million copies per month, and nearly 90 percent of the world’s PCs ran on a Microsoft operating system. Microsoft deepened its position in operating systems with Windows, a graphical user interface whose third version, released in 1990, gained a wide following. Thereafter, most manufacturers of personal computers licensed MS-DOS as their operating system, generating vast revenues for Microsoft by the early 1990s it had sold more than 100 million copies of the program and defeated rival operating systems such as CP/M, which it displaced in the early 1980s, and later IBM OS/2. MS-DOS was released with the IBM PC in 1981. Microsoft purchased an operating system from another company, modified it, and renamed it MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System). In 1980 International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) asked Microsoft to produce the essential software, or operating system, for its first personal computer, the IBM PC. During the next few years, they refined BASIC and developed other programming languages. Shortly afterward, Gates and Allen founded Microsoft, deriving the name from the words microcomputer and software. Allen, two boyhood friends from Seattle, converted BASIC, a popular mainframe computer programming language, for use on an early personal computer (PC), the Altair.

In addition to its main research and development centre at its corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, U.S., Microsoft operates research labs in Cambridge, England (1997) Beijing, China (1998) Bengaluru, India (2005) Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008) New York, New York (2012) and Montreal, Canada (2015). It has sales offices throughout the world. The company also publishes books and multimedia titles, produces its own line of hybrid tablet computers, offers e-mail services, and sells electronic game systems and computer peripherals ( input/output devices). Microsoft Corporation, leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications.

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