Microsoft FreeCell

Paul Alfille implemented Freecell in 1978 for the PLATO computer system at CERL; by the early 1980s Control Data Corporation had published it for all PLATO systems. Jim Horne, who enjoyed playing Freecell on the PLATO system at the University of Alberta, published a shareware $10 MS-DOS version with color graphics in 1988. That year Horne joined Microsoft, and later ported the game to Windows.

The Windows version was first included in Microsoft Entertainment Pack Volume 2 and later the "Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack." It was subsequently included with Win32s as an application that enabled the testing of the 32-bit thunking layer to ensure that it was installed properly. However, FreeCell remained relatively obscure until it was released as part of Windows 95. In Windows XP, FreeCell was extended to support a total of 1 million card deals.

Microsoft created the Entertainment Packs to encourage non-business use of Windows. According to company telemetry FreeCell was the seventh most-used Windows program, ahead of Word and Microsoft Excel.

The original Microsoft FreeCell package supports 32,000 numbered deals, generated by a 15-bit, pseudorandom-number seed. These deals are known as the "Microsoft 32,000", and all but one of them have been completed. Later versions of FreeCell include more than one million deals. When Microsoft FreeCell became very popular during the 1990s, the Internet FreeCell Project attempted to solve all the deals by crowdsourcing consecutive games to specific people.