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Microsoft Celebrates 40th Anniversary
HughPickens.com writes Alyssa Newcomb reports at ABC News that the software company started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975 is 40 and fabulous and highlights products and moments that helped define Microsoft's first four decades including: Microsoft's first product — software for the Altair 8800; Getting a deal to provide a DOS Operating System for IBM's computers in 1980; Shipping Windows 1.0 in 1985; Microsoft Office for Mac released in 1989; Windows 3.0 ships in 1990, ushering in the era of graphics on computers; Windows 95 launches in 1995, selling an astounding 7 million copies in the first five weeks, and the first time the start menu, task bar, minimize, maximize and close buttons are introduced on each window.
For his part, Bill Gates sent a letter to employees celebrating Microsoft's anniversary, and how far computing has come since he and Paul Allen set the goal of a computer on every desk and in every home, and predicting that computing will evolve faster in the next 10 years than it ever has before.
For his part, Bill Gates sent a letter to employees celebrating Microsoft's anniversary, and how far computing has come since he and Paul Allen set the goal of a computer on every desk and in every home, and predicting that computing will evolve faster in the next 10 years than it ever has before.
40 years ago I never heard of it.
MicroSoft
Or if it no longer BSODs and keeps going in an undefined state?
in every household
and convincing IBM to pay them per install.
No mention of Microsoft Bob??? That was one of Microsoft's biggest innovations. Bob even led to innovations in other products...anyone remember Clippy, the animated paper clip in Office that everyone loved?
Firefox says that nowhere on this page does the term "Windows Vista" occur. We really ought to mention it somewhere, eh guys?
Adobe set a worrying pattern here that I think Microsoft wants to follow: Software as a Service. That is, monthly or yearly fees for licenses. And the reason is that, for some people, some software do everything you need. A similar thing happens with the CPUs - upgrade cycles are becoming longer.
Ah, yes! The Apple ][ Plus. I remeber her.
My first was a PDP 11 - the Apple was around, but she was there first. I remeber fondling her orange and white switches, putting my hands on her tape spools and turning, and flicking run/halt ever so gently.
She was a little harsh at time - she loved screaming FAULT! But it just made me appreciate the gentleness of the Plus.
The old days!
Windows 3.0 ships in 1990, ushering in the era of graphics on computers
I think Apple might have something to say about that claim....
Happy 40th Anniversary and may you live forever Microsoft.
Thank you for helping my business with your reliable and affordable products (from the DOS times until now), and for making computers usable for all people (from coders like me to even illiterates around the world).
A Greek that uses "Linux" almost 3 decades now, but -while anonymous- is not the usual Slashdot coward...
(haters gonna hate!)
WOW: "ushering in the era of graphics on computers", WTF is HughPickens.com smoking?
I don't get how everyone is swallowing this propaganda whole every time there's a corporate PR push like this, computer graphics predates Microsoft by decades, and computer graphics 'in every home' predates Windows 3.0 by at least 5 years if you only take the various Apples, Commodores/Amigas, Ataris that were out by 1985 and literally sold millions by then (C=64 e.g. sold 27 million overall until Commodore went bankrupt in 1993). Even "multimedia" was a popular Commodore marketing term for their CD-ROM equipped systems years before Windows 95. This blurb makes it sound like Microsoft "innovated" again and invented computer graphics all by themselves.
Same for "the first time the start menu, task bar, minimize, maximize and close buttons are introduced on each window" (style errors aside: "start menu"/"task bar" on every window?), again min/max/close buttons were present on every window in early Lisa/MacOS, AmigaOS, Atari TOS, even Geos for C=64 way before MS copied it from Apple (who copied it from Xerox). The only thing Microsoft keeps (re)inventing is history. I guess stock prices aren't inflated high enough yet.
That's funny. Apple, with the Lisa I believe, and even more notably Commodore with the Amiga, were the ones who ushered in the era of graphics on computers. But yeah let's rewrite history while we're souping up Microsoft infore the release of Windows 10.
Someone should send them a birthday cake.
"Microsoft's greatest contribution to the world of computers was advertising."
Microsoft's contribution has been finding ways to abuse people.
Winows made PCs finally not feel like a terminal system (in two meanings)
That letter couldn't disguise his boredom with Microsoft. There was no passion, just the expected rah rah's and a perfunctory mention of three products coming out of their labs.
TRS-80 in the late 70s. First was Basic, written by Microsoft. Then Z-80 assembly using the Microsoft editor, assembler, and linker. Did my debugging with TASMON (The Alternate Source Monitor), which was a great debugger.
Sometime in the 80s Microsoft went from being a great company to being a group of douchebags.
They brought computing to the masses...
For all that Apple, Amiga, Commodore, etc. did, they did not bring computers to the masses.
Even IBM was never going to do that, it wasn't in their vision. They tried half hearted with the PC Jr. and we all know how bad that was.
Bill Gates "got it", he understood that we could live in a world where every home had a computer in it. We aren't there yet, but we're well on our way.
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Is Bill Gates a saint? Far from it, he is a ruthless business man who ran a large company for a long time. Steve Jobs isn't a saint either, being cut from largely the same cloth as Gates.
We wouldn't have Linux today either, without such people, because it was built on the backs of giants as well, large companies that made strides in software long before Linux was a dream.
MS isn't perfect, but they aren't the devil either. They are simply a large company trying to make money while making customers happy (which makes them more money).
I was told there'd be cake.
Serenity now, insanity later.
WTF?
"Windows 3.0 ships in 1990, ushering in the era of graphics on computers"
LOL. Which idiot wrote this summary? There were no "graphics on computers" before 1990 then?
Ballmer probably read and re-read Gates' letter and got madder and madder when he couldn't find his own name. Obviously Gates decided that Steve Ballmer was a mistake.
- though it hardly seems necessary after the swathe of self-congratulations mentioned in the OP.
Windows 3.0 ships in 1990, ushering in the era of graphics on computers
Isn't that just a bit rich, when it is well-known that the X Window System was actually invented at MIT (Wikipedia):
The original idea of X emerged at MIT in 1984 as a collaboration between Jim Gettys (of Project Athena) and Bob Scheifler (of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science)
- MacOS and Windows work according the principles invented by these guys, so when did "the era of graphics on computers" begin?
What M$ did best was copy the inventions of others and spin PR like few others could and keep their distributors flooded with products, which did not work most of the time until after about 1999.
On capital numbers, Apple Inc. (fmr Apple Computer) is in the hundreds of billions whereas M$ in the the 10s of billions.
On number of employees M$ exceeds Apple by about 30 thousand.
On value per employee: M$ $0.000700990037165 E 0 billion per employee, Apple $0.002365704081633 billion per employee.
Apple Wins.
Ha ha
PS In a few years those BIG retirement payouts and Healthcare programs will eat M$ into /null.
The eight-bit micro sold in the millions.
The MS-DOS and Windows PC took sales into the hundreds of millions of units.
The modular design of the PC made rapid advances in sound and graphics possible.
But the geek tends to forget that games like Commander Keen and King's Quest were a revelation --- because you could play them on an home office machine that had. no built-in hardware support for animation.
ought to be enough for anyone.
First off, I like what Microsoft is doing these days. I like what they are doing with open source, I like that they are really supporting other platforms. I even think Azure looks like a nice server solution.
That said I don't think we should EVER forget that the computer industry lost around two decades of progress as Microsoft crushed all innovation and competition, and along with it real advancement in computer science and writing applications. There's also Microsoft trapping who knows how many brilliant minds inside Microsoft R&D, their work never to be seen again in anything meaningful because it might have impacted Windows.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To be fair, Commodore, etc. brought the computer to the masses in the form of plastic cased consumer products that parents could buy their children in department stores. That was a breakthrough that behemoths like IBM couldn't accomplish. The IBM PC came from the 'entry systems' division of IBM. They thought they were coming out with a low cost 'smart terminal' that could connect to their mainframes. Or at least a part of IBM's management thought that was what they were up to. I'm certain renegade elements within the corporation knew better.
Perhaps in the sense they "standardized" the OS and software by bundling and monopolizing it. But this had the side-effect of stopping progress once they knocked out a market category.
I've seen the same bug set in MS-Access linger for about 15 years: MS didn't care because there was no practical alternative to MS-Access: they had pretty much killed Paradox and dBASE because Office bundling made Access the obvious choice in both price and familiarity. (And they bought out FoxPro).
And they were not innovators; they purchased or stole most of the key technologies they depend on.
If you believe competition is the key to innovation and choice, then what MS did cannot be viewed in a good light. Microsoft stifled the industry; we'd be better off without them.
Table-ized A.I.
Excel (first introduced on the Mac in 1985) was a huge step forward from Lotus 1-2-3. Word (first graphical version also on the Mac in 1985) blew WordPerfect right out of the water.
Developing these for the Mac gave Microsoft a taste of what a GUI could do, which was much more than Lotus and WordPerfect were doing with their crappy GUIs grafted onto CLI programs. Even by 1990 and Windows 3.0, Lotus and WordPerfect still stank.
That they bundled Word and Excel in 1989, whatever. The real innovation happened years before.
If you believe competition is the key to innovation and choice, then what MS did cannot be viewed in a good light. Microsoft stifled the industry; we'd be better off without them.
I do believe that competition is good...
But if we had not had Microsoft, it would have been someone else. The situation would not be improved if Apple was the monopoly stakeholder, or IBM, etc...
The question becomes, is there room for two companies to make a desktop OS? Maybe, but it would seem not to be the case. There were plenty of people trying back in the 80's and 90's, remember GEOS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
There were lots of stuff like that back in the day, none of those companies would have done any different.
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Perhaps a better question is... what else would you like to see at this point, in 2015? We can talk until we're blue in the face about the past, but that is water under the bridge. Where do we go from here?
I agree with you that it was a ripe time for a microcomputer monopoly to form. But saying that MS is not a problem because they happened to be the one plugging the monopoly hole is kind of an odd argument.
Ideally there would be no monopolization. But if we assume for the moment that there is no practical way to prevent the kind of monopolization that happened, then we have to consider an MS domination versus some other co's domination.
Under that scenario, I haven't seen any evidence that MS is a better monopolist than other potential monopolists.
During IBM's monopoly heyday a generation earlier, they invented the hard-drive, floppy drive, relational databases, and perfected multi-tasking OS's and modularization of hardware. I don't see a similar set of accomplishments from MS. Clippy? MS was a ho-hum plug into the monopoly hole.
Table-ized A.I.
IBM would have kept PCs at $5,000...
There is always that...
I agree that any monopolist is bad, no matter the stripes...
We could debate that until the cows come home. It isn't 1990 anymore, it is 2015...
Now what?
I've seen a lot of pro and con posts about Microsoft's place in computer history. Maybe this post will help people see it more clearly.
So what exactly did Microsoft invent? Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
I don't believe it's immoral or wrong for folks to make their livelihood using Microsoft products, but I do think it's unwise to do business with Microsoft while being ignorant of their long history. I also think it's dishonest not to admit that the Microsoft Corporation has a long history of doing shady things to software partners (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars and http://www.justice.gov/atr/cas... for example) , OEM vendors, Standards Boards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML) and lastly to customers (http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf)
... MS might be forty this year but 2015 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
...for the Apple II is still their greatest achievement to date. Bravo Microsoft, bravo.
Interesting that nearly all advancement and innovation in computing is happening in areas that Microsoft does not occupy, or if they are there, they are a bit player or leech.
Android will put all the nails in the coffin of Microsoft. Around the world people do not have the disposable income we have in the USA. The poor will get computers and the 3rd world counties will for many. In the developing lands we want something that works like an iPad and if we don't have the ability to buy one for each family member we will use android. All the developers that don't have their head in the sand or their ass have seen this and are writing android apps for the billion devices out there already.
There are a smaller group that have more disposable income and have purchased several Mac computers, iPads and iPhones. Not the norm but a big number.
The dying breed are the ones stuck to the Windows PC for gaming, for enterprise apps and old fashioned MS Office. Any PC user with a brain would have ditched MS Office some time ago for the open source office packages and been quite happy. Windows 10 for $x per month, that will create a thermo nuclear war. Just because you build a huge cloud with your spare cash your sitting on does not mean you will attract customers. You leave a $250 steak at your kids lemonade stand it will not sell no matter how many you buy, how many you cook or how many you have on display. Give that steak enough time and you got yourself some smelly food that is attracting flies and other undesirable animals. Your moving product but not in a sustainable way.
Good luck MS, I am ready for a change. I am sure there were longtime IBMers that we ready for IBM/Mainframers to shoot themselves in the foot when MS was the underdog.
Your Average Joe
No, CPM machines would've eaten them at that price. They may have tried, but reality would change them. Anyhow, I don't think IBM was equipped to be the PC monopoly. They were already settled in an "enterprise" mentality. Maybe Apple, Tandy, or Commodore if they had played their cards right.
Table-ized A.I.
Disclaimer: Propoganda by Your Average Joe, Google's paid shill!
"Windows 3.0 ships in 1990, ushering in the era of graphics on computers..."
You've lgot to be kidding me!
The East India Trading Company just turned 415 years old in December! THAT is the oldest, most time-tested company of all time. In altered forms, it still exists to this very day...
Not sure if it was 25 or 30th anniversary, Microsoft contacted me for some antique computers they wanted to borrow for a photo shoot. I said sure, cough up some bucks for the rental. (I had rented some before for movie/photo shoots,etc.) They politely declined which was no surprise.