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Recognizing Microsoft alumni at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
The crowd at GeekWire’s recent Microsoft@50 event included many current and former employees and executives from the company, and we capitalized on the opportunity to recognize them.
First, the Microsoft Alumni Network provided buttons featuring Microsoft’s different logos through the years, which attendees wore to show when they worked there.
The Microsoft Alumni Network table at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
During the program, we asked everyone in the crowd to stand up, and then had people sit down based on when they started at Microsoft.
Ultimately, there was one person standing: Steve Wood, a former Microsoft engineer and general manager, who joined the company in 1976 in Albuquerque, N.M.
Wood is in the upper left of the iconic Microsoft photo taken in 1978 in Albuquerque, not long before the company moved to the Seattle region.
Front row (left to right): Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, and Paul Allen. Middle row: Bob O’Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, and Gordon Letwin. Back row: Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, and Jim Lane. (Microsoft Photo)
Wood grew up in Seattle, but he didn’t know Microsoft co-founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates until he was hired at the company in New Mexico. A Stanford graduate with experience in microprocessor technology, he was finishing his master’s degree in computer science in 1976 when he saw a Microsoft recruitment notice.
He was brought on to expand Microsoft’s offerings, initially working on the development of a Fortran compiler.
As he recalled in an interview with GeekWire last fall, he was either employee No. 5 or 6, depending on how you count. He ended up working on a wide variety of projects, and his duties later expanded to include general manager.
Steve Wood acknowledges the crowd during GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
“It was a family,” he recalled of the Albuquerque crew. “We spent hours and hours at the office together, long days, and then a lot of evenings we’d spend together. … We would play chess, random card games. We’d just talk. We’d watch movies. We’d listen to Paul play guitar. … It was a very close group of people.”
After leaving Microsoft in 1980, Wood worked in commercial microprocessors for a public company at the time called Datapoint. He later reunited with Allen to work on companies including Asymetrix, Starwave, and Interval Research, as part of a long career as a business and technology leader in the Seattle region.
Watch a video above of the alumni recognition at the Microsoft@50 event.
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