Windows History
In 1975 Microsoft started out as a small corporation pioneered by several folks – chiefly, Bill Gates, Paul Allen (also known as the benefactor of “Spaceship One”, a major leap forward in the privatization of Space Exploration) and Steve Ballmer, a man with key sales and business experience. This combination of talent allowed this group of PC enthusiasts to venture into business writing an operating system for what is considered by many to be the first personal computer, MIT’s Altair. It wasn’t much to look at – just a box of circuits and blinking LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes), as you can see. We wouldn’t recognize it as a PC by today’s standards. But in its time, it was a hot item.

I remember when I was a child at this time that home PC kits were very popular. I got one for Christmas one year, a RadioShack Tandy computer kit (not really a PC), just a collection of parts and IC chips that you connected with pre-stripped wires to metal springs. This would make different logic circuits and with plastic overlays and punch cards you could interpret the results of various blinking LEDs. It even played a rudimentary game of “Tic-Tac-Toe”. I wonder if anyone still makes those kits? Ahh...  Good times… good times.  ;-)

Anyway, the fledgling Microsoft wrote an OS for the Altair in Basic, a language invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1964. The acronym stands for, “Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”, if you are curious.

In 1976 Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple I for the interesting price of “666.66” on “April Fool’s” Day. In 1978, Commodore released the Commodore PET. Microsoft developed the BASIC language for this computer, and then sold the source code to Apple. (Arrghh, me maties! Pirates we be!)

I remember my first “real” computer, a Commodore VIC 20. It had 20 Kb of memory and used a television for a monitor. I remember programming in BASIC and saving to and reading from a cassette player. Commodore called it a “Datasette”, we called it a ‘Datasuck”. It took 25 minutes to load my favorite game from cassette – “Telenguard”. Heaven forbid you should lose power. A few years later I got a Commodore 64 – 64K, wow! Then the next Christmas I even got a 5.25 floppy disk drive – it was like alien technology! When I went off to college, my second year I leapt light years into the future – I got an IBM 286 running the MS-DOS operating system, with a whopping 20 MB hard drive! I just knew I would never fill that thing up. F-15 strike eagle on orange monochrome and a Hercules graphics card never looked so fine…

By 1980, Microsoft had released their first hardware product, the “SoftCard”. It allowed people to run CP/M programs on the Apple II. In addition to BASIC programming languages for the Altair, Commodore and Apple, they had developed versions of COBOL and PASCAL.

A major turning point came when Microsoft entered into a contractual relationship with IBM to provide the operating system for their PCs. They did not actually have an operating system, but after securing the contract, Microsoft bought DOS from Tim Patterson at Seattle Computer Products for $50,000. They then modified it, repackaged it and sold it to IBM for millions. (Surprisingly, Patterson says he is not bitter.) All is fair in love and capitalism – sellers beware! Bill is an exceptionally smart businessman; he also managed to convince IBM to allow Microsoft into a non-exclusive contract so they could sell DOS to IBM’s competitors.

By 1984, Apple was selling the Macintosh, the first mass-marketed GUI operating system. Until its release, operating systems had been mostly command-prompt based. It’s interesting to note that Apple did not “invent” the GUI, much like Microsoft did not “invent” DOS. XEROX engineers invented both the GUI and the mouse. Unfortunately for them, management did not understand the value of these ideas and did not secure proper patents to protect them. In their naivety, they even invited Apple to come in and take a peak. Off course, Apple obliged and stole and pirated their brightest ideas, massaging them into a more “artistic” version and releasing them in the Macintosh.

Steve Jobs was fond of quoting Picasso, “Good artists copy but great artists steal” and adopted as a company slogan, “It's better to be a pirate than join the navy”. Apple was known to fly the skull and crossbones on several occasions – it’s true, look HERE. (Arrghh, me maties!)

Ah, but karma is eventually served, just when we think we’ve “gotten away with it”, we reap the things we have sown.

In 1985 Microsoft released Windows 1.0. They took the idea of the GUI and mouse that Apple had stolen from XEROX, reverse engineered it, repackaged it and created a competing force that would eventually diminish Apple. Needless to say, Apple and Jobs were not too happy about this. They had been swindled! What goes around comes around. (Arrghh!)

Windows and Apple enthusiasts tend to demonize each other from time to time, but it’s important to realize that NO ONE is innocent here – everyone is guilty. Linux is doing the same thing, reverse engineering Windows and OS X. The industry is like a great big bunch of swash-buckling pirates. And I’m o.k. with that – I like pirates. They are interesting fellows. J

To continue, Windows evolves and progresses into more and more powerful operating systems. In 1987 Windows 2.0 was released. In 1990 Windows 3.0 was released. In 1990 Windows 3.1 was released.

Windows 3.11 for Work Groups is the first Microsoft GUI I remember using way back when. It was better than sliced bread, though nothing compared to today’s Vista or 2008.

In 1994 Windows NT 3.5 was released – this was a major improvement to Microsoft’s NT 3.1, released in 1993 – their first hearty attempt at producing a client-server architecture.  Until then, their products were designed for a predominantly peer-to-peer environment. Then later in 1996 Microsoft released their NT 4.0 server and workstation products.

I remember NT 4 and 3.5 as my first true Windows networking experience. Until then, I only had experience with Windows 3.11 and 95 in peer-to-peer environments or in conjunction with Novell. At work, we combined two NT servers and some NT workstations with our Windows 95 PCs and our two Unix AIX/SCO servers. Though initially NT had difficulties with the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), its stability grew with each service pack.

In the old NT architecture, you had a single-master configuration of a PDC (Primary Domain Controller) and BDCs (Backup Domain Controllers). The PDC was the server on which configurations and administrative activities were conducted, and the BDCs provided some backup in case of failure and load balancing. The BDCs were not writeable, however, so if your PDC went down you had better get it back up quickly.

By 1999, Windows 98 SE, as a consumer client OS, was wonderful, light-weight, efficient, powerful and full of new features. Windows ME came out in 2000; I remember it was truly “half-baked”. It lacked many networking tools and features and had instabilities in the HAL.

In 2000, “2000 Professional” was released.  It was wonderful, though not as “divine” as XP. Microsoft had successfully stabilized the HAL, expanded the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List), and implemented the choice of their NTFS file system along with FAT32.

There were two main innovations that really put Microsoft’s products on top of their competitors in the industry. These are the NTFS permissions system with its ACEs and DACLs, and Active Directory. The combination of these proved instrumental to Novell’s decline as a network OS. As they are rather involved, we will cover these topics in the next session. (©2008 C. Germany)

 

©2008 C. Germany