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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.
in every household
and convincing IBM to pay them per install.
I did. Microsoft was the big dog in the world of BASIC. My second personal computer, an Apple II Plus, came with Applesoft BASIC in ROM, a Microsoft product, of which I have fond memories. Happy birthday Microsoft!
unfortunately digital "agents" are still very much a thing with ask google and siri and cortana... the idea that you have an ai that knows better than what you want to do is stil very much alive, though not of course working at all like described.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
40 years ago I never heard of it.
Often I wish I never heard of it, today.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
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.
Yeah MS is evil and nothing they do is ever good. .NET? More like FailNET. Why don't you just use Java? Java has uhh... It's uhhh better because you can use it on like 10% of the computer market-share, or something! Yeah portability!
Plus what's up with Windows? Why can't everyone just learn Bash or something and use Linux (but only [insert favorite distro]). GUIs are dumb! I went to programming school so like, everyone else should know what I know about computers, sheesh stupid morons.
And why not just open source everything, no strings attached? They don't need to make money! Also *grumble grumble* my job doesn't pay me enough *grumble*.
Whoo am I right guys?
AmigaBASIC also came from Microsoft. It was pretty good, although for some reason you needed a RAM expansion to perform a graphics fill operation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Winows made PCs finally not feel like a terminal system (in two meanings)
Convicted monopolist, right there with AT&T and Standard Oil...
Good-bye
If you think that is all it was about, then why are you even on Slashdot?
Good-bye
What as up with everything having BASIC back then? I remember reading the BASIC manual for the Commodore64 (a great manual) and writing BASIC programs only to find it severely limited in what it could do. That experience turned me off from programming for the next decade. It was only when I learned C that it became clear to me how powerful programming can be. . .
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.
---
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).
Microsoft was the big dog in the world of BASIC
Microsoft was the big dog in programming languages for the micro, period. That made it very attractive to the team that was developing the IBM PC.
- 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?
BASIC.
Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
Beginners.
That's what was up. Besides, you really could do quite a bit with BASIC on those machines by linking to Assembly code. Although many of us had to unlearn twisted spaghetti code in order to progress anywhere, I do wonder what horrible PTSD cases we would have created if high school kids in the 1970's had to start out with C. Talk about a dystopian future.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I hate how much I like C# and .NET.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
anyone remember Clippy, the animated paper clip in Office that everyone loved?
I see you are making a reference to Clippy, would you like some help with that?
I didn't mind Clippy that much, but I seriously dislked that @#$@#$ Search dog. He was actually dumber than Clippy, if that's possible and seemed to cause a performance hit.
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.
A more intelligent person than the AC who said:
There were cars before the Ford Model-T, would you claim that Ford did not user in the era of the horseless carriage?
There were electric cars before the Toyota Prius, but would you claim that Toyota did not user in the era of the electric car?
Ushering in the era doesn't mean you are first, but that you are the most effective/impactful.
By your logic, it should not be said that Apple ushered in the era of the smartphone or tablet, plenty of companies had them before... yet Apple was the first to get it right and establish broad appeal.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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.
The acronym for BASIC came from the era when it was mainly a pedagogical tool. Similarly, there was an operating system that originated as a pedagogical tool, called MINIX. People took BASIC and MINIX ran with them to make something more than both ideas started out as. So today there are powerful BASIC compilers with extensive libraries that you can use to easily build tight little binaries to burn into Flash on chips like PIC microcontrollers. And there is Linux, which Torvalds created because MINIX wasn't doing enough of what he wanted it to do.
The beauty of BASIC is that you can throw together spaghetti code and get a controller chip pushing bits up and down the wires fast, while saying 'fuck you' to the people with pee running down their leg because you used goto statements. They'd still be writing up their data structures whereas your circuit is already moving bits around and making things happen in the real world. (assembly is good too, but you need a good library then. With BASIC on a PIC controller, you can drop in a line or two of code to turn any spare I/O pin on the chip into a serial I/O port for quick debugging)
This. BASIC was the first language i learned, first on DOS then on an Atari ST... (I made the most of old computers when i was young when everything else was windows.)
All i can remember is having fun writing graphics stuff but hating the crudeness of the language, and i really didn't get very far. Picked up programming again so much later, maybe it was all BASICs fault... or maybe i just wasn't persistent enough, i duno. So i don't get what was good about BASIC either.
The first IBM PCs came with BASIC in ROM and sported a cassette port on a DIN jack next to the keyboard connector. So they fully embraced the Microsoft BASIC model, while also selling MS-DOS (along with two other operating systems, including CP/M-86, that didn't sell as well) on the PC. A floppy disk drive was really expensive back then. The 160k floppy diskettes themselves cost multiple dollars each.
It was about defeating Netscape, which had a cocky little prick in charge claiming he was going to take over the desktop and have everybody running browsers with proprietary extensions connected to application servers produced by... Netscape.
So we can thank Microsoft for squashing little twerk Andreesen, which gave us Mozilla out of the Netscape codebase. If twerk-boy had succeeded we would all probably be connected through web terminals to operations like Oracle to run our apps now.
It sucks either way, no matter how things worked out. But Microsoft's base is build on open hardware. In the old days every time Microsoft produced a new bloated version of their OS, it meant more free/cheap hardware for Linux. Not a bad thing at all, compared to, for instance. Apple. (do you know what a hassle it is to boot NetBSD on an SE/30? Apple liked shit like that in the era of big-bad Microsoft)
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.
thats not true, they do make some good keyboards still
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
---
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.
The search dog is the only search I know works in Windows. The later version didn't work, and the one in Windows 7 doesn't work. A few weeks ago I was searching for a file I could see on the screen, and it didn't find it. I have no faith at all in any search in any version of windows apart from the Dog in Windows XP.
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.
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.
Wow, I still have a copy of Minix 1.5, full reference manual and the 5.25" floppies it came on. Minix was a Great OS, even on the XT's.
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.
Try DIR at the command prompt. I pretty much never use the GUI search, I've always found it to be slow and cumbersome.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Well, I have to admit, me too. If it wasn't for MS, IT security wouldn't be the huge field it is today.
A big warm thank you to MS for perfect job security, on behalf of everyone working in IT security, forensic or disaster recovery.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Windows 3.0 ships in 1990, ushering in the era of graphics on computers..."
You've lgot to be kidding me!
More WHUT?: "AmigaBASIC also came from Microsoft. It was pretty good" - So good that it instantly crashes on every Amiga with FastMem because they assumed they could use 8 bits of the address space for internal housekeeping. The only way around that was disabling it, leaving you with the built-in, slow (up to 3.5 MB/s!) 256K-2M of ChipMem. It also broke every Amiga styleguide, up to and including detailing busy loops for waiting in the manual (100% CPU use, "fsck proper timing/multitasking, we only know how to be like DOS").
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.