Microsoft Corporation is an American
multinational corporation headquartered in
Redmond,
Washington, United States that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to
computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell
BASIC interpreters for the
Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the
home computer operating system market with
MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the
Microsoft Windows line of operating systems.