What year was Microsoft founded?

1975 → tub · coal.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft on 4 April 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after seeing the Altair 8800 — the first hobbyist microcomputer — on a magazine cover. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter for that machine, which let ordinary people program a computer without writing raw machine code. Betting that software, not hardware, would be where the money was, they moved to Seattle and rode the personal-computer boom to dominance with MS-DOS and then Windows. Peg 19 · 75 → tub · coal: a tub heaped with coal.

Go deeper:

• Triumph of the Nerds, Part 1 (Robert X. Cringely) — the birth of the personal-computer industry, with Gates, Jobs and Wozniak on camera.