Not Bill Gates, This Man Was The First Employee Of Microsoft
What comes to your mind when asked about who could have been Microsoft¡¯s first employee? Perhaps either of its co-founders Bill Gates or Paul Allen? Well, none of them was Microsoft¡¯s first employee. Then who was?
What comes to your mind when asked about who could have been Microsoft¡¯s first employee? Perhaps either of its co-founders Bill Gates or Paul Allen? Well, none of them was Microsoft¡¯s first employee. Then who was?
Who Was Microsoft¡¯s First Employee?
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Microsoft hired its first full-time salaried employee Marc McDonald in the year 1976. He worked at Microsoft from April 1976 - January 1984 (Systems Software Designer) and then again from December 2000 - September 2011 (as Principal Development Engineer).
What Did Marc McDonald Do At Microsoft?
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At Microsoft, McDonald is credited with designing the FAT File System for standalone BASIC which was also used as the file system for the MS-DOS operating system and Microsoft Windows.
He left the company in January 1984, citing a reason that Microsoft had gotten "too big" (around four hundred employees at that time). He was Asymetrix's first employee where he worked on a Lisp pcode system used internally and redesigned the ToolBook runtime and compiler for ToolBook 3.0. At Design Intelligence, Marc worked on adaptive document design and an expression-based programming language used for layout experiments. Marc rejoined when Microsoft bought Design Intelligence in late 2000.
When McDonald rejoined Microsoft, a number of employees including Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were involved in trying to get him assigned the employee number "1". However due to a limitation in the human resources software, that proved to be too difficult. Instead, he carried a badge with all the digits scraped off except "1", as per the Microsoft Fandom report.
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McDonald worked in the QA-oriented Windows Defect Prevention group, focusing on organizational best practices to drive software quality from the bottom up. He is co-author of The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention published in November 2007. He holds six software patents. McDonald left Microsoft in September 2011.
Marc McDonald then worked as a software architect at automated display ad creation tool maker PaperG from 2013-2016. The company then worked under the name Thunder Experience Cloud from 2016, post which it was purchased by Walmart in 2021.
Also Read: How Bill Gates' Microsoft Once Missed Out On $159 Billion By Selling Apple Stock Early
When Did Microsoft's First 11 Employees Click A Picture?
Microsoft¡¯s first eleven employees had gathered in 1978 to take a picture before the company moved from the Mexican city of Albuquerque to Washington.
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Front row (left to right): Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, and Paul Allen.
Middle row: Bob O¡¯Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, and Gordon Letwin.
Back row: Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, and Jim Lane.
Also Read; Bill Gates Meets Ratan Tata & Tata Group Chairman
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