Microsoft's IPO turns 40 today. If you invested $1,000 in Microsoft in 1986, you’d have $5.5 million today

Microsoft's IPO turns 40 today. If you invested $1,000 in Microsoft in 1986, you’d have $5.5 million today

It began with a simple magazine cover, and then involved into one of the most valuable companies on the planet with technology that is used in virtually every part of daily life.  In January 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen spotted the Altair 8800 personal computer on the front of Popular Electronics and saw something most people didn’t: a machine desperately in need of software. That realization became Microsoft, a portmanteau of “microprocessor…