Long before the days of tapping your smartphone against someone else’s to share contact information, small paper business cards did the trick — even for someone as tech-savvy as Bill Gates.
In a nod to simpler times, one such card is up for auction, featuring Gates’ office address and telephone number from Microsoft’s early days in Bellevue, Wash. The beige card features Microsoft’s first logo, and Gates’ name appears as “William H. Gates,” a name more often associated with his father.
The 45-year-old card is being offered by Lelands, a New Jersey auction house specializing in sports memorabilia and trading cards, as part of a “Summer Classic Auction” that runs through Aug. 16 and features such items as L.A. Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani’s 300th career home run ball and a rare Shoeless Joe Jackson 1914 signed baseball.
There is a currently a single $500 bid on the Gates card.
According to Lelands, the card was obtained directly by the consignor during a business meeting on Nov. 6, 1980, and was hand-dated by that person in black ink. The date is significant in tech and computer history because it’s when Microsoft signed a deal with IBM to create an operating system for a new IBM personal computer.
Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen developed the Microsoft Disk Operating System, commonly known as MS-DOS, and according to a post on “This Day in Tech History,” they “shrewdly included a clause in the agreement [with IBM] that allowed them [Microsoft] to sell the operating system to other companies under the name MS-DOS.”
“That clause made Microsoft a giant, and it changed history,” Lelands says in its auction item description.
Founded in 1975 in Albuquerque, N.M., Microsoft moved to Bellevue in January 1979. The company’s office on Northeast 8th Street in the heart of the city’s business district was on the eighth floor of the Old Bank Building. The location is now referred to as the Plaza Buildings.
The phone number on the card includes a 206 area code for Seattle, before a split in 1997 created 425 for the growing Eastside and cities such as Bellevue and Redmond.
Special coverage: Microsoft @ 50
