City of Redmond history

Chugging up and down the Sammamish River and crisscrossing the lake that feeds it, the flat-bottomed boats carried goods and passengers until 1916 when the Chittenden Locks opened, lowering local lakes and waterways by nine feet.

The two-story brick Redmond Union High School was built in 1921.

And in 1928, just one year after a fire destroyed the block with the original wood frame Redmond Hotel, the three-story brick New Redmond Hotel opened to guests.

In the 1930's, the airport was improved using WPA funds.

A silver lining from that era was the community spirit that led to the Redmond Bike Derby – a fundraiser begun in 1939 to buy Christmas decorations for the town and school athletic gear.

When the first Lake Washington floating bridge opened in 1940, the town had only 503 residents.

Redmond's high-tech industrial growth began slowly in the 1960s, and by century's end helped push the population to 45,256.

The first tech companies to locate here included United Control (1961), which made aircraft electronics.

In 1963, the Evergreen Point floating bridge was completed, initiating vigorous residential development.

Rocket Research Company started operations in Redmond in 1968.

Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the company had outgrown its offices in Bellevue and was looking for a place to set up a corporate campus.

Microsoft dramatically expanded its electronic publishing division, created in 1985 and already notable for the success of its multimedia encyclopaedia, Encarta.

Also see: Nancy Way, Our Town: Redmond (Redmond, WA: Marymoor Museum, 1989).

Microsoft deepened its position in operating systems with Windows, a graphical user interface whose third version, released in 1990, gained a wide following.

By 1993, Windows 3.0 and its subsequent versions were selling at a rate of one million copies per month, and nearly 90 percent of the world’s PCs ran on a Microsoft operating system.

A United States Justice Department investigation concluded in 1994 with a settlement in which Microsoft changed some sales practices that the government contended enabled the company to unfairly discourage OS customers from trying alternative programs.

In response, Netscape accused Microsoft of violating its 1995 consent decree and sued; those efforts helped to persuade the Justice Department to reopen a broad investigation of Microsoft.

Sales were initially disappointing, but by 1996 Windows NT was being hailed as the likely standard for PC networking, quickly surpassing Novell’s NetWare in market share.

In 2001 an appeals court overturned the breakup order but still found the company guilty of illegally trying to maintain a monopoly.

In 2002 it launched Xbox Live, a broadband gaming network for its consoles.

Years later, the mansion became home of the Marymoor Museum of Eastside History, but in 2003 the King County Department of Parks and Recreation took it over for use as an event facility.

In July 2004, the company announced plans to acquire an additional 20 acres by buying the corporate headquarters of financially troubled clothing retailer Eddie Bauer.

A more powerful gaming console, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005.

The Lake Washington School District opened Rosa Park Elementary in the Fall of 2006.

In 2002 it launched Xbox Live, a broadband gaming network for its consoles. For example, in 2009 the company cut the price of the Xbox 360 Elite by as much as 25 percent in order to pick up market share.