Technology History | Two Park Central Tower — Suite 819, and Nothing Marks the Eighth Floor

Microsoft's first office of its own was Suite 819, on the eighth floor of a ten-storey tower in north-east Albuquerque.

The company leased it in the autumn of 1976, and by its own published accounting the year ended with six employees and revenues of $22,496.

Before the tower there had been rented space beside MITS, the firm that built the Altair 8800 — the machine that had brought Bill Gates and Paul Allen to New Mexico at all.

What they sold was a BASIC interpreter for it, delivered on a coil of punched paper tape.

The trade name went on the register with the New Mexico Secretary of State in November 1976, and the hyphen in Micro-Soft quietly stopped being used.

The company stayed in the tower until the final days of 1978 and moved to Bellevue on 1 January 1979, having found it hard to persuade good programmers to move to Albuquerque.

Two things about this address get muddled.

The commemorative plaque Microsoft paid for in 2006 is not here — it marks the earlier premises near MITS, and it was stolen in 2012 and stolen again in 2013.

Nor is this a bank building, though it stands beside one: Two Park Central Tower went up in 1975 as the second piece of a development that was supposed to have more pieces than it got.

What has happened since is the reason to write the entry now rather than later.

The tower was listed in May 2023 at $500,000 and sold at auction that August for $2 million, with more than two hundred bidders competing for it.

Local reporting has recorded a fire at the building, it has stood largely empty since the sale, and it was put up for auction again in 2026.

A neighbourhood meeting has discussed converting the offices into flats.

Nothing at all marks the eighth floor.

Photo: Altair BASIC on punched paper tape, labelled by hand in ballpoint — Microsoft's first product, and the reason there was a company to rent Suite 819. No freely licensed photograph of the tower itself appears to exist; this is the artifact, not the address.

Sources: Microsoft's own History of Microsoft timeline for 1976, which gives the suite number and the revenue figure; HistoryLink; English Wikipedia; Construction Reporter and ABQ RAW on the building's recent history; Atlas Obscura on the plaque.

Photo: Michael Holley, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.