In one of the most truly amazing business success stories, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975 and built it into one of the world's largest and most successful companies. The company was created at a critical time in the evolution of personal computers and out-maneuvered its competitors to become a virtual monopoly in its business. The company's initial success hinged more on astute marketing and pricing than leading edge technology. Over the years, however, Microsoft has proved adept at co-opting good technology, acquiring companies, catching up quickly when necessary, and growing their own in-house research efforts.
The underlying operating system, MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), was released in 1981 for IBM computers. The MS-DOS command line interface was the dominant mode of interaction until Windows was introduced. Windows is a graphical, direct-manipulation interface in the style of the Apple Macintosh interface (which was based on earlier work done at Xerox PARC). Although Windows 1.0 first shipped in 1985, the Windows interface came of age with the Windows 3.0 release in 1990. Subsequent noteworthy versions include Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows CE, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows ME, and Windows XP.
Windows 98 was the last version of Windows based on the MS-DOS kernel. Windows 2000 was based on a new operating system that Microsoft developed from scratch, Windows NT, with more powerful features like those found in the Unix operating system. (The Apple Macintosh has similarly evolved with MacOS being replaced by OS X, which has a Unix kernel.) MS-DOS can still be accessed from any version of Windows by clicking Start / Run and typing "command" or by typing "cmd" in Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP. For the past two decades, the term "PC" has been dominantly associated with a computer running a version of the Windows operating system on hardware with an Intel processor -- a combination sometimes referred to as the Wintel platform.
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Copyright 2003 by Mark Jones.
Last updated
July 01, 2004.