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🎬 Prefer to watch? Here's the 60-second version: Watch on YouTube ▶ 💻 The Rise of Microsoft — a 20-part series. See all parts » Every empire has an origin story, and Microsoft’s begins not with a product or a boardroom but with a machine that a group of mothers bought at a rummage sale. In 1968, the Mothers’ Club at Lakeside School — a private prep school in Seattle — took the proceeds from a used-goods sale and did something almost no school in America was doing: they bought computer time. A clattering Teletype terminal was wheeled into a small room, wired up to a distant General Electric time-sharing computer, and left there for the students to discover. Most of them shrugged. Two of them never really walked away. A room, a terminal, and two boys who wouldn’t leave One was a small, intense eighth-grader named William Henry Gates III — born in Seattle on October 28, 1955, and known to his family as “Tr...

How did a company born from a bluff over a computer nobody had — two kids promising software they hadn’t written yet — end up on nearly every desk on Earth, survive a near-breakup, stumble through a lost decade, and come back as one of the most valuable companies in history? This is The Rise of Microsoft , a 20-part series tracing the whole arc: from a teletype in a Seattle prep school, through the IBM deal that built an empire, the Windows and Office years, the antitrust war, the Ballmer plateau, and the Nadella cloud-and-AI comeback. A new part publishes regularly — bookmark this page to follow along. The full series Part 1: Two Kids and a Teletype — 1968–1974: Bill Gates and Paul Allen fall for computers at Lakeside School Part 2: We Have BASIC — 1975: the Altair 8800, the audacious phone call, and the founding of Micro-Soft Part 3: An Open Letter to Hobbyists — 1976: Gates argues software has value and shouldn't be copied ...

On June 16, 2026 , Cursor — the AI code editor from Anysphere — announced Origin , its own Git hosting platform. Within hours the internet had already written the headline for them: "Cursor is coming for GitHub." It's a tempting story. It's also the wrong one. Origin isn't trying to build a better GitHub. It's betting that the thing GitHub was built for — humans writing code — is about to stop being the main event. What Origin actually is Strip away the hype and Origin is a Git forge : code hosting, review, and collaboration, fully Git-compatible so your existing tooling just works. What makes it different is the assumption underneath it. GitHub was designed in 2008 around human cadence — commits arriving over hours and days, pull requests read by people over coffee. Origin assumes the opposite: that dozens or hundreds of AI agents will hammer a single repository at once, opening branches, resolving conflicts, and merging in seconds. The feature ...

🎬 Prefer to watch? Here's the 60-second version: Watch on YouTube ▶ 📚 The Rise of Google — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 19: The AI Pivot Twenty-seven years earlier, two graduate students who could barely stand each other had wired cheap hard drives together in a Stanford dorm and asked a simple question: what if you ranked the web by who links to whom? The answer became an algorithm, then a company, then a verb. By 2026, that company had a name most of its own users had never heard of — Alphabet — and it sat among the two or three most valuable enterprises on Earth. This is where our story arrives: at the giant, and at the harder question of what a giant does next. The numbers of a colossus Start with the scale, because the scale is genuinely difficult to hold in your head. In fiscal year 2025, Alphabet reported revenue of roughly $403 billion and net profit of about $132 billion — a company ...

🎬 Prefer to watch? Here's the 60-second version: Watch on YouTube ▶ 📚 The Rise of Google — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 18: Becoming Alphabet For most of its life, Google thought of itself as a search company. You typed words into a box, and an algorithm ranked the web. That algorithm was clever — PageRank had, after all, launched an empire — but it was still rules written by engineers. Somewhere in the 2010s, the people running Google began to suspect that the future belonged to a different kind of software: one that learned for itself. This is the story of how a search company decided it was really an artificial-intelligence company. A team that taught a computer to see cats The pivot did not start with a grand announcement. It started with a small research group. In 2011, three researchers — Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and the Stanford professor Andrew Ng — began building a deep-learning...

🎬 Prefer to watch? Here's the 60-second version: Watch on YouTube ▶ 📚 The Rise of Google — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 17: Moonshots On the afternoon of August 10, 2015, Google put out a blog post with a title that read like a children's book: G is for Google . It was written by Larry Page, and by the time readers reached the second paragraph they realized they were watching one of the largest companies on earth quietly turn itself inside out. Google was not being sold. It was not being broken up. It was being demoted — folded into a brand-new parent company that, until that morning, nobody outside a small circle knew existed. Its name was Alphabet. The idea sounds simple once you see it, but almost nobody saw it coming. For seventeen years "Google" had meant everything the founders touched: search, ads, YouTube, Android, self-driving cars, balloons that beam internet, a company trying to cure death. Page'...

🎬 Prefer to watch? Here's the 60-second version: Watch on YouTube ▶ 📚 The Rise of Google — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 16: The Machine By 2010, Google had already won the argument it started in a Stanford dorm room. Search was solved, the ad machine was printing money, and the company was big enough to buy almost anything it wanted. So Larry Page asked a stranger question than "how do we grow?" He asked: what would we build if failure didn't scare us? The answer was a semi-secret lab called Google X — founded in January 2010, tucked into a building about a mile and a half from the main campus in Mountain View. Its first hire was Sebastian Thrun, the roboticist who had won the DARPA challenge for self-driving cars. Its mission, in the lab's own words, was to "invent and launch moonshot technologies that could make the world a radically better place." Not better products. A radically better world . The bar w...

🎬 Prefer to watch? Here's the 60-second version: Watch on YouTube ▶ 📚 The Rise of Google — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 15: Google in China Type a few words into a box, hit Enter, and answers appear before you've finished blinking. It feels like nothing — like the web simply knows . But behind that empty white box sits one of the largest, strangest machines humanity has ever built: hundreds of thousands of computers, spread across the planet, wired together to behave as if they were a single brain. For years, almost no one outside the company knew it existed. This is the story of the machine. A cathedral built from junk In the late 1990s, the conventional wisdom was that serious computing meant serious hardware: big, expensive, brand-name servers from the likes of Sun or IBM, each one engineered to almost never fail. Google went the opposite way. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were graduate students on a shoes...

🎬 Prefer to watch? Here's the 60-second version: Watch on YouTube ▶ 📚 The Rise of Google — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 14: Chrome For most of its rise, Google treated the open web as a birthright. Information wanted to be found, links wanted to be followed, and the company's job was simply to be the best door in. Then it walked into the one market where the door came with a lock, a guard, and a list of things you were not allowed to say. China would become the hardest test yet of Google's founding promise — the place where "don't be evil" stopped being a slogan and started being a decision with no clean answer. The bargain Google had offered a Chinese-language version of google.com since September 2000, but the site sat on the far side of the Great Firewall — slow, throttled, and periodically blocked. To actually compete with the homegrown giant Baidu, Google needed servers and a license inside the c...

🎬 Prefer to watch? Here's the 60-second version: Watch on YouTube ▶ 📚 The Rise of Google — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 13: Android By 2008, Google was a verb, an email service, a map of the world, and the owner of the most-watched video site on Earth. It ran on the web. And the web ran inside a program Google didn't control: the browser. For most people that program was Microsoft's Internet Explorer — slow, aging, and shipped free with every copy of Windows. Google's entire business flowed through a front door built and owned by its biggest rival. On September 1, 2008, Google decided to build its own door. The launch that leaked early Google announced Chrome in the strangest way a technology company ever has: a 38-page comic book. Drawn by the celebrated cartoonist Scott McCloud, it walked readers through why Google was reinventing the browser, panel by panel. The plan was to mail it to journalists and bl...