Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a car-counting machine called Traf-O-Data before they started Microsoft.

In 1972, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Traf-O-Data to help city planners track traffic. Back then, cities used rubber hoses on roads to count passing cars. These hoses punched holes into long strips of paper tape that people had to read by hand, which was a slow and boring job.The duo built a custom computer using the Intel 8008 microprocessor. This was the first 8-bit computer chip ever made. This tiny chip ran at a speed of about 0.8 MHz and could only hold 16 KB of memory. For comparison, a modern smartphone is millions of times more powerful than their traffic machine.They wrote special software that could read the holes in the paper and turn them into digital charts for traffic engineers. Even though the business did not make much money, it was a huge milestone in tech history. It proved that software could be sold as its own product.This project gave the pair the skills they needed to start Microsoft in 1975. It marked the moment when counting things moved from slow manual work to fast digital processing. Without this car-counting machine, the personal computer revolution might have looked very different.