A Quiet Celebration At Microsoft -- Annual Employee Party, New Museum Mark Company's 20Th Anniversary

About this time 20 years ago, Micro-Soft, Bill Gates' fledgling company, topped $16,000 in sales - just enough to inspire his parents, who called him "Trey" (for the III in William H. Gates III), to write the following poem and include it in the family Christmas card:

Trey took time off this fall

in old Albuquerque

His own software business -

we hope not a turkey.

(The profits are murky.)

What a difference two decades can make.

Microsoft (now without the hyphen), marks its 20th anniversary this month, commemorating a history that would come off as gloating, at best, if it were capsulized in a Christmas card. Microsoft last year approached $6 billion in annual sales. Financially, the company has grown by a factor of 375,000 in the past 20 years.

Instead of hyping the anniversary, the company is noting it quietly. Employees have celebrated off and on for the past month, dressing up one day in Microsoft garb (T-shirts, hats and accessories) and dining one day at 1970s prices in company cafeterias.

There is no specific anniversary date to note, said company spokeswoman Erin Carney. Gates and Lakeside School classmate Paul Allen started the partnership that became Microsoft in 1975, working in Albuquerque with a computer company named MITS. In fact, it was the early income from BASIC, the software language Microsoft wrote for MITS, that inspired the Gates Christmas-card poem, according to the book, "Gates - How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America."

The anniversary celebration is taking place this month mostly because this is when the company holds its annual employee meeting and begins a new fiscal year, Carney said.

Employees gather tomorrow for their meeting/party, and the anniversary will be a key theme. The meeting has grown so large it has been held the past few years in the Kingdome, but this year, because the Seattle Mariners are using the Dome for the American League championship series against Cleveland, the 10,000 or so local employees will go to the Tacoma Dome.

The longest-lasting tribute to Microsoft's anniversary comes in the form of a new company museum on Microsoft's Redmond campus. The museum, which just opened, is mainly for employees and customers but will be open beginning next year for scheduled tours by school and community groups. There are no plans to open it to the general public. While documenting the rise of the world's largest software company, the museum also tracks the evolution of the personal-computer industry, going back to the 1960s with a teletype computer identical to the one Gates and Allen used while at Lakeside.

A hardware exhibit features several generations of computers, including the original Macintosh and the MITS Altair 8080, which first inspired Gates and Allen to write software and which became the center of Microsoft's first business deal in 1975.

Exhibits touching on Microsoft's work-hard-play-hard ethic probably would be the most interesting to the non-techie visitor. There is a picture of Gates after someone threw a pie in his face at an employee gathering, one of Vice President Steve Ballmer swimming across a campus pond, and a video of former Chief Financial Officer Frank Gaudette, who died in 1993, performing a Blues Brothers routine at a company meeting.

One corner of the museum depicts the typical programmer's office - a desk covered with trade magazines, white drawing board covered with scribblings such as, "How do I e-mail Help desk to let them know my e-mail is down?"