Bill Gates is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Microsoft by sharing the Altair Basic source code that created the very foundation of the company.

To mark the occasion, Gates has released the source code he and Allen wrote for the Altair 8800 – dubbed Altair BASIC – which became the company's first product.

But that simplicity is what made the basic HTML view so perfect. Because it takes so little data to access, you could still access Gmail with a bad internet connection or while on an ancient device.

50 years after the founding of Microsoft, Bill Gates has now published the entire source code of Altair Basic, the software that laid the foundations for the billion-dollar company.

As of January 2024, Google is discontinuing the option to display Gmail on your browser in the Basic HTML view. A new post in Google's Help Center says Gmail will automatically change to Standard ...