A quick look at the technical hub of Seattle and its relationship with Microsoft, one of the largest tech companies in the world and one of the most famous products of Seattle.
Seattle is the largest city in the state of Washington. When people normally think of the Emerald City, most tend to think of the Space Needle, Seahawks football, Mariners baseball, Starbucks coffee, the hit show Grey’s Anatomy, or technology giants Microsoft and Amazon.
What many people may not actually realize about Microsoft is that the company was not actually founded in Seattle. In March 1975, Seattle natives Bill Gates and Paul Allen successfully created a working BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 microcomputer produced by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). Their product was then distributed by MITS as the Altair BASIC and Microsoft was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico in April 1975. Microsoft remained based in New Mexico until 1979. Gates and Allen, wanting to be closer to home, moved the company from Albuquerque to the Seattle area.
The move from the deserts of New Mexico to the rainy forests of Washington state attracted more programmers to Microsoft – there are more software developers in Seattle today than anywhere else, including Silicon Valley! Being able to now recruit top talent, Microsoft enjoyed may successes in the early 1980s. Afterward, many millionaire employees had left Microsoft to found their own companies, and Paul Allen became a major investor for new companies after resigning from Microsoft in 1983 due to a Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis.
As a result, the period from the mid-1980s into the 1990s was a boom period in which many companies such as AttachMate (1982), RealNetworks (1994), and InfoSpace (1996) were founded in the Seattle area. When Jeffrey Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, he chose to launch the company in the Seattle area because of the abundant technical talent that Microsoft had drawn to the area.
In today’s world, Seattle is one of the many important technical hubs around the world. As previously mentioned, there are more software developers in Seattle than any other technical hub in the world, including Silicon Valley. Like the 1980s and 1990s, there is a great diversity among companies in the Seattle area as the region is home to a vast number of tech companies that vary in size and type.