If you had the good fortune to have bought 100 shares at the $21 offering price that day and sat on the investment for 25 years, it would have mushroomed into 28,800 shares over the course of nine stock splits and be worth about three quarters of a million dollars today (excluding dividends).

That’s the good news. Here’s the disheartening caveat: Had you instead sold your stash on Dec. 1, 1999, when Microsoft’s stock price reached its peak, you would have reaped $1.4 million.

You have to believe someone did … and tells that story every day.

Speaking of good fortune, Fortune magazine was granted inside access to Gates, his executive and legal teams, and their Wall Street partners in the months leading up to the IPO. That arrangement resulted in a terrific fly-on-the-wall story published four months later. Here are a few highlights gleaned from that story and other online resources:Gates was not at all anxious to go public, but Microsoft was bumping up against federal regulations governing the number of private stockholders a company can have before being required to register with the SEC.

A quote from Gates: ''The whole (IPO) process looked like a pain, and an ongoing pain once you're public. People get confused because the stock price doesn't reflect your financial performance. And to have a stock trader call up the chief executive and ask him questions is uneconomic -- the ball bearings shouldn't be asking the driver about the grease.''