As Richard Nixon destroyed happiness with his war on drugs, the 1970’s saw the world’s first personal computers, inspiring five geeks to start a pair of companies which would go on to shape the future of computing as we know it.

In January of 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen called up Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems claiming to have a working BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer. While that claim was entirely fictitious, it took Gates and Allen just two months to create the product they claimed to already have.

With the interpreter working flawlessly, MITS agreed to distribute the software under the name Altair BASIC. Microsoft was officially established just one month later, on April 4^th, 1975. After launching their first Disk Operating System (DOS) in 1980 Microsoft quickly began to grow into one of the biggest names in personal computing.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded their company, Apple, on April 1^st 1976, just short of one year after the inception of Microsoft. Unlike Microsoft, who chose to focus on operating systems for other people’s hardware, Apple began their business by selling bare-bones hand-built computer kits, named the Apple I.

After Wayne sold his shares of the company to the Steve’s for just $800, Apple incorporated on January 3^rd, 1977. With the backing of Multi-millionaire Mike Markkula, Apple Computers Inc. had the funding it needed to develop the most advanced personal computer to date, the Apple II (launched on April 16^th 1977).

With color graphics and an open architecture, the Apple II set the course for personal computing, beginning the battle for dominance of what soon proved to be one of the biggest un-tapped markets in history.

99% of Computer users either use Apple’s Mac OS X or Microsoft’s Windows but let’s see which is older and which is better. The below infographic by Manolution shows you the history of Computing in the last 30 years and shows a great time-fighting between Apple and Microsoft. Have fun.