Microsoft Company (Windows)

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Microsoft Company

Website 2007 Paul Allen and Bill Gates went to the same school and founded the company Traf-O-Data together in 1971 for the production of small computers with an Intel CPU for the measure of car traffic. They got a contract at MITS (Micro Instrumentation und Telemetry Systems) to provide BASIC for the Altair. In 1974 they designed the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8080 as Lakeside Programmers Group. Fortran and COBOL also were programmed for the Altair and the BASIC interpreter was ported for the TRS 80 from Tandy. The company Micro-Soft was founded in summer of 1975 to develop software for the IBM PC and port the programming language BASIC. Later followed beginning from 1977 Fortran and assembler, COBOL in 1978 and Pascal 1980. In 1978 Microsoft licensed a development licence for UNIX from AT&T. Because AT&T had protected the name of the operating system UNIX, Microsoft named the UNIX variant of her own as Xenix.

1980 the enterprise moves with now 38 employees to Seattle and reaches 8 million U.S. dollars sales volume. IBM searched for his microcomputers for an operating system which fits for the mass market. At first IBM consulted Digital Research without success and after that to Microsoft which had been strengthened by Steve Ballmer in meanwhile in organisation and finances. But Microsoft had no own operating system and bought therefore Q-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for 50,000 U.S. dollars. IBM licensed it under the name MS-DOS. The IBM PC became an overwhelming success. The sales volume and profit of Microsoft increased further in consequence this one. Bill Gates got a contract with SCO to bring out a UNIX variant for the IBM PCs. First with publication of 80286 processor this turned out well and Xenix was possible. Microsoft cared primarily about the OEM business and SCO was responsible for the customization and improvement of the UNIX derivative. In July 1987 Microsoft bought the company Forethought and integrated the software under the name Powerpoint into the own office applications. Since 1994 the slogan "Where Do You Want to Go Today?" was spread by advertizing.

Originally Windows used a monolithic kernel but was later changed to the micro kernel. Comparable under the different Windows versions is the uniform program interface in Visual C with largely uniform usability. Windows profits from an enormously high number of free and shareware of other developers. The Windows and general software development is controlled by Microsoft and follows one defined roadmap, the product life cycle is limited and updates as well as support for one fix time period availably. The support is realized directly by Microsoft or certified partner companies. The successful enterprise has the primary objective to offer operating systems in the form of Windows for customers(end-user), professional and server area (enterprise). The business model of Microsoft offers the same platform for end-users and enterprises with standard implementations for software developer.

At the final release the Windows .NET servers (Windows Server 2003) shall be available as a Web server version, standard server, enterprise as well as data center version. The enterprise and data center version being also designed for 64 bit on the Intel Itanium. For the information exchange the open standards XML (Extensible Markup Language), SOAP (XML based protocol of information in the web which is for the exchange structured and standardized) and UDDI (Universal Discovery Description and Integration) are included. In January 2002 Bill Gates announced in an internal mail the start of the "Trustworthy Computing" initiative. The central concept of Peter Biddle imagines a combination from hardware and software which provides a new security architecture with the project name palladium (renamed in NGSCB later). Well known manufacturers like Intel and AMD already support this initiative and work on the realization together. Important points are the secure communication between all hardware components, an integrated firewall, hidden memory areas for applications, encrypted files, proved signatures as well as different authorization and authentification services and DRM (Digital Rights Management). This concept needs a completely different computer design, the encoding and decoding shall be guaranteed by a co-processor. Windows with the code name Longhorn shall contain this technology and approximately come on the market in 2004. Microsoft gained about 7.8 billion dollars profit at a sales volume of 28.4 billion dollars in 2002. Microsoft has at the end of the year 2003 more than 49 billion dollars in cash plus company shares and investments. The market success of Microsoft products is guaranteed by long-term announcements, early available beta versions for programmers and professionals as well as marketing. Microsoft announced the consolidation of the previous 7 lines of business areas into 3 divisions in September 2005: Business division (formerly Information Worker, Microsoft Business Solutions), Entertainment & Devices (formerly Home and Entertainment, Embedded Devices) and Products & Services (formerly Windows Client, Server & Tools, MSN). Microsoft cancelled the support for Windows 98/SE/ME on July 11th, 2006, now there are no new updates or security fixes more available.

Bill Gates announced at the 2006-06-15 to draw back himself of the daily work and his leading role of Microsoft as of July 2008. For a smooth transition Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect) and Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) already take main responsibilities of Bill Gates. Bill Gates talked in his last official speech on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2008 to finish his main activity at Microsoft. Starting from July 2008 Bill Gates wants to be attended with his wife Melinda Gates to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and for Microsoft only in the function as a chairman and adviser in central issues.
Microsoft reached an agreement together to improve the maintenance and cooperation of the different operating systems with several Linux distributors. The contract includes licence agreements, the work on the format exchange between OpenXML as well as Open Document format (ODF), and partly two-way safety against patent claims. Included companies are Xandros (since June 2006), Novell (Nov. 2006), Linspire (June 2007) and TurboLinux (Oct. 2007).

Microsoft works on a completely other operating system philosophy than Windows for quite a long time. The Singularity Project is build up from scratch for reliability. For this goal the programming tools has necessarily to be made adapted for the new system architecture. Under the development name Singularity all programmes shall run in isolated processes.

Software titles


- Visual BASIC, programming language
- Visual-C++, programming language
- Visual-J ++, programming language
- Visual FoxPro, programming language
- Office 2000 with the individual applications Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint
- Project 2000, planning of projects
- Exchange server, e-mail service
- SQL server, database service
- Front page, HTML program
- Publisher, Website manager
- PhotoDraw, pixel based image processing
- Encarta 2000, knowledge dictionary
- Internet Explorer, Internet browser
- DirectX, software interface for 3D games
- Host integration server 2000
- Site server 3.0
- BackOffice server 4.5
- ODBC 3.0
- Proxy server 2.0
- Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) server
- Systems Management server
- SNA server
- Internet Information server (IIS)
- Microsoft Bob (1992)
- Services for UNIX (SFU)
- Windows operating systems
- Microsoft Works (1986)
- Singularity operating system (in Research)
This list does not lay any claim to completeness

History of Microsoft


April 4th, 1975 foundation of Micro-Soft corporation by William H. Gates III and Paul G. Allen in New Mexico.

Novembers 26th, 1976 the term Microsoft is registered as a brand name.

Novembers 29th, 1979 in Belgium the first branch office in Europe is founded, the main business place was transferred to Washington.

June 25th, 1981 foundation of Microsoft Inc. with Bill Gates as presidents and Paul Allen as an Executive vice-president. Microsoft employs 128 employees and reached a sales volume of 16 million dollars in the year.

August 12th, 1981 IBM released the first PC and delivers it with Microsoft's 16 bit operating system MS-DOS 1.0.

September 29th 1983 subscribers of the professional journal "PCWorld" get a free disk with the demo version of Microsoft Word.

November 10th, 1983 announcement of Microsoft Windows, the extension of MS DOS with a graphical user interface.

January 24th, 1984 market introduction of the Macintosh by Apple. Microsoft becomes one of the leading providers of software for the Macintosh.

Novembers 20th, 1985 Microsoft Windows is released to the market . By the few available software, the market acceptance remains little at first.

February 26th, 1986 moving of the main business place to Redmond in Washington.

March 13th, 1986 stock exchange start of Microsoft. The first quotation amounts to 21 dollars and reaches 28 dollars at the end of the first trading day.

May 22nd, 1990 Windows 3.0 is published.

July 25th, 1990 Microsoft celebrates the 15-year existence and the reaching of the first sales billion.

August 30th, 1990 the Microsoft Consulting Services is founded to support important global customers at the use of Microsoft software.

May 24th, 1993 introduction of Windows NT.

Novembers 14th, 1994 start of an international advertising campaign with this slogan: "Where do you want to go today?".

August 24th, 1995 worldwide introduction of Windows 95. Within the first 4 days Windows 95 is sold to about one million times.

November 27th, 1995 publication of the Internet Explorer 2.0 for Windows 95.

Decembers 7th, 1995 Bill Gates commits Microsoft to strengthened engagement in the Internet area.

June 25th, 1998 worldwide introduction of Windows 98.

13.01.2000 in the evening showed Bill Gates his resignation from the executive board chairmanship of the company Microsoft. Steve Ballmer who has a position as a president since 1998 takes his job as a Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Gates remains active and is working as Chief Software Architect further in the chairmanship of the supervisory board.

February 17th, 2000 worldwide introduction of Windows 2000.

June 22nd, 2000 Microsoft introduces the concept of the Microsoft .NET platform, a new generation of Internet software and services. With the support of XML new and dynamic networking possibilities are created and data can be converted arbitrarily into other formats and layout's.

25-10-2001 publication of Windows XP operating system.

7-11-2002 publication of the Tablet PC.

June 24th, 2002 "Trustworthy Computing" initiative is started , security concept palladium (later NGSCB) is introduced

April 2003 Windows .NET servers are ready.

December 2003 Other companys can license the FAT file system

Source: Microsoft