The History of Windows….Microsoft that is. Pt1

In the Beginning there was…

On Friday October the 28th 1955 Microsoft was born, or to be more accurate Bill Gates was born. At school Gates met Paul Allen soon to be co-founder of Microsoft. There first endeavour came about after Allen showed Gates an article in a computer magazine about an Altair computer. Gates rang Mits the company who made the Altair informing them that he had a programming language for their computer (though he didn’t), they accepted his offer so he set out to write a programming language for the Altair called BASIC.

And Gates created…

After writing BASIC for the Altair Gates redistributed it onto other computers such as the Apple II and commodore 64, enabling it to be a widely used Operating System.He then sold the programming language and Started up Microsoft.

The Name itself was the idea of Bill Allen the mix of Microcomputers and Software name done and the company took off. For the next five years Bill Gates worked tirelessly building up Microsoft working constant 16 hour days and personally checking each line of code created.

The first big opportunity for Gates under the Microsoft banner was with IBM (International Business Machines), Microsoft wanted to work with IBM to deliver their BASIC programming language for the IBM PC, but were contacted first by IBM to create an operating system for their in-development IBM PC, IBM wanted an OS similar to the CP/MOS. IBM and Microsoft formally signed a contract but the genius of it was Microsoft did not have an Operating system for IBM.

Let There Be DOS…

Allan knew of a small company named Seattle Computer Products that had developed an operating system called QDOS, Microsoft bought this OS for $50000 reworked it and turned it out as Microsoft DOS. Microsoft cleverly included a clause in the agreement that allowed them to sell the operating system to other companies under the name MS-DOS. It was this clause that changed the course of technology history, opening the door for Microsoft to become the dominant technology company of the PC era. Microsoft seemed to understand that by controlling the operating system, the underlying hardware became less relevant.

Briefly MS-DOS is short for Microsoft Disk Operating System, this is a non-graphical command line operating system derived from 86-DOS that was created for IBM compatible computers. MS-DOS originally written by Tim Paterson and introduced by Microsoft in August 1981 was last updated in 1994 when MS-DOS 6.22 was released. MS-DOS allows the user to navigate, open, and otherwise manipulate files on their computer from a command line instead of a GUI like Windows. Today, MS-DOS is no longer used; however, the command shell, more commonly known as the Windows command line is still used by many users.