William H. Gates III, cofounder and chairman of Microsoft Corp., had returned to talk technology and share his vision of a future empowered by software innovation, not to wax nostalgic about his aborted college days nearly 30 years ago. But he couldn't help recalling that, in April 1975, at Harvard's old Aiken Computation Laboratory, on the site where he now sat, he had written a software program for the Altair computer -- a program that evolved into Microsoft's first product.
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/02/27/software_palooza/
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/02/27/software_palooza/