Bill Gates, Microsoft and Albuquerque

Stopping by Albuquerque, New Mexico, one day on my trip out to the Grand Canyon, I came across the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. It had a great selection of dinosaurs and other things to look at (including space exploration), but the exhibit that I found most fascinating was the development of the personal computer. 

Why did the Albuquerque museum have an extensive exhibit on the personal computer? Because when Microsoft was first founded, it was in Albuquerque. Bill Gates and Paul G. Allen first set up shop in Albuquerque because they wanted to write software for the newly-invented personal computer, the Altair 8800, which was being sold by the world's first personal computer store, right there in the middle of New Mexico.

So the museum has a great exhibit of the various people and products, ideas and innovations, that led to the computer becoming such an integral part of people's lives, including that networking thing that eventually became the world wide web. 

And here are some photographs I took while visiting the museum. Just click on them to see a larger version. 

 

The World's First Computer Store in Albuquerque sold the Altair 8800 Computer

   

 

The first computer mouse 

The designer of the Apple desktop icons and Gates and Allen of Microsoft

 

Early computers

 

Speed of computer processing increases exponentially

The birth of the internet world wide web

 Some interesting statistics