Wednesday · November 11, 2026
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Gates and Allen convert a partnership to a corporation; Microsoft is now a Washington company on paper

Six years after selling BASIC out of Albuquerque, the firm behind MS-DOS swaps its garage-era legal structure for one built to scale.

Six years after Bill Gates and Paul Allen started selling BASIC interpreters out of Albuquerque, their company was still technically a partnership — a legal structure built for a garage, not a software empire. In 1981, with MS-DOS already shaping the personal computer market, Microsoft formally incorporated in Washington state, the home it had adopted when it moved to Bellevue in January 1979. The paperwork was routine. What it formalized was anything but…

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More from June 25
1788

Virginia ratifies, 89 to 79; the union's largest state is in

Patrick Henry's three weeks of thunder fall short as Edmund Randolph switches sides, and the promise of a Bill of Rights seals the margin.
2013

CIA releases documents confirming a classified base at Groom Lake, Nevada exists

The disclosure, triggered by a Freedom of Information Act request filed eight years ago by a George Washington University researcher, answers narrow historical questions; current operations remain classified.
1950

North Korean guns open on the 38th parallel at dawn; Seoul has no tanks to stop them

Kim Il Sung's forces pour south into an almost entirely unprepared country; the U.N. Security Council condemns the invasion, and Truman moves toward committing U.S. troops.
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The Presentment Clause forbids the president from unilaterally excising provisions from enacted law, the Court rules, voiding cuts to a New York liability exemption and a Snake River potato-farmer tax break.
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Read the full June 25 edition →Everything that happened on June 25 →
More from Cold War America
1962

Kennedy goes on television: Soviet missiles sit in Cuba, and the Navy will stop every ship

The president calls it a quarantine, not a blockade, so Moscow cannot call it an act of war.
1946

A camera rides a captured Nazi rocket 65 miles up and photographs the curve of the Earth

The rocket smashed into the New Mexico desert, but the film survived.
1958

Pan Am's jet lands at Le Bourget; New York to Paris in six hours of air time

A refueling stop in Gander was the only thing slowing the Clipper America down.
1962

One officer says no, and a Soviet sub's nuclear torpedo stays in its tube

Depth-charged and nearly out of air near Cuba, B-59's crew thought the war had already started.
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