Four landmarks in early Micro-soft history

This is a biased abstract taken from "Fire in the Valley", the book from Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger.

1972 Bill gates teams with Paul Allen They make the typical hacking and amateur engineering stuff, including some essay of highway traffic statistics (Traf-O-Data). Finally Allen enters Honeywell and Gates goes to Harvard to study laws. They will team again to write Altar BASIC, the first Micro-Soft product.
Allen left MS development around 1984, although he is yet the second major individual shareholder.
1975 MicroSoft writes Altair BASIC.
This contract starts the MS tradition "sell first, program after". Gates phoned to Altair claiming they have wroten a BASIC for that machine; of course Altair people asked they to show it, so Gates asks for three weeks of time and start pushing Allen and himself to program full time. Actually, Allen finished the needed code six weeks after, in the plane going to Alburquerque to show the product.
1976 Gates writes its letter against piracy.
He promises that if paid, he will contract programmers to write good software. And he claims that to develop software gratis is impossible.
1980IBM allies with Microsoft IBM asks MS to develop for them a BASIC, and to adapt the CP/M operative system. Gates arranges for IBM guys to meet Kendall, the programmer and owner of CP/M, but misteriously the meeting fails and MS agrees with IBM to develop also the OS. To this end, Gate contracts Tim Patterson, author of 8086 SCP-DOS, to port it to the IBM "Project Chess" in a very "CPMish" style.
It is said that when IBM chairman, John Opel, was told about the negotiation with Microsoft, his first question was "Oh, is that Mary Gates's boy's company?" (and of course it was).