When I was at uni in NZ (mid 70s) me and my friends wrote a compiler for 6800s (an algol subset, it fit in 2k), we wrote it with copyrights for "uSoft" (that's a greek mu), in retrospect it was an obvious name at the time.
Later we discovered some other guys using the same name in the US (also with a mu) they had a basic interpreter, how lame! (we had a compiler) however we really didn't understand the advantages of being born in the right place .....
I really wish we'd incorporated, we could have sold the name for some silly amount of money
Not just "incorporated", you would also have to have ported it to various computers that were sold (as MSFT did - and that Bill Gates' parents were lawyers with IBM contacts helped a lot).
NZ is a fantastic country, but is relatively remote from larger markets, and its own population isn't large enough for the economics of scale to apply only locally. So even if you had tried, you may have failed. As you rightly say, power of location. On the other hand, now, due to globalization, things are possible there, too - for example, the app market is not limited geographically.
BTW, you should consider uploading your old compiler's code on GitHub if you still have it; there is increased interest in "software archeology" now, given that so many emulators have been built.
I was more talking about owning the name in NZ (and maybe Oz)
The software source was on cards (developed on a simulator on a uni mainframe, much like Microsoft were developing their code), sadly the cards were left behind when I moved to the US a decade later
If you read Bill Gates' biography, you'll learn that he had an incredible foundation. A big part of that was his parents and grandmother, who not only loved him deeply but also nurtured his passions — enrolling him in a private school, taking him to therapy, driving him to many extracurriculars such as those done by the Scouts, and helping him develop social skills with the members of his community.
But it wasn’t just his parents. His broader community and the environment he grew up in also played a key role in setting him up for success in ways that many others, may not have experienced. For example, from early on he had access to a PDP-10 and was allowed to practice programming from a very young age.
Not to undersell Gates, the guy was incredibly intelligent and hardworking, but the conditions he was raised in definitely gave him a head start. He had opportunities that were rare at the time, and an incredible support system that helped him develop his potential.
I worked in a digital technology company in Wellington in the 90s and one of our key technologies that we sold was a hosted form on a secure (remember, this is the era that https was not common) website to collect credit card payments. We were a proto Stripe in the year 1999 but totally in the wrong place in the world to take advantage of it.
May have been the wrong time too. 1999 was chock full of companies that failed to get traction and died during the dot-com collapse, but variants became much more successful 20 years later. Much of this was mostly waiting in infrastructure I suspect.
It's also almost 50 years since "An Open Letter to Hobbyists"[1]. It's amazing that in the last 30+ years, the "hobbyists" managed to turn the entire software industry by 180°, and that Microsoft themselves are reliant on that work.
Bill even specifically mentions musicians. By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it. Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].
Nice try ChatGPT stealing from studio ghibli and Scarlett Johansson are still two egregious examples of what can kill artist's motivations. Why create or publish if credit is not given?
True, virtually all companies harvesting LLM training datasets don't bother honouring even the most permissive licenses, like MIT or BSD - Microsoft leading the pack with Github and Copilot.
You're right to point out that the tide is shifting again. Perhaps at the end of this bubble, society and/or the behemoth companies will recognise the value and help build a more sustainable future for artists and creators. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Devils advocate: Imagine how much richer developers would have been today if software wasn't copied as much as it is today. Companies would have to pay developers to write it (we probably wouldn't have as much overall growth but devs would be richer). AI also wouldn't have been able to replace us if it was more secretive and proprietary.
Imagine how much public good can be done if the government had public software works project that did not need to rely on advertising to be useful while serving everyone (not just a boardroom of millionaires).
>By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it.
I do enjoy some Led Zeppelin, and I often enjoy the artists they didn't credit, even more.
> And now most of those hobbists are going back to commercial licenses
It seems to be specifically the "hobbyists" that are also taking VC investment money for their "hobby project". It's pretty clear what's driving these decisions: VC's are not okay with a bootstrapped, penny-pinching business focusing on specialized support or custom development (which is the successful RedHat model), they want an early chance at really outsized returns.
Back in the day that letter was relevant we used to sell little tools via ads on magazines like BYTE, Dr Dobbs Journal and co, occasionally get nice money out of it.
Also in the early BSD/Linux days, there were distributors like Walnut Creek, Amiga had Fish Disks, and so forth, some money could eventually go back to tool writers.
While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore, I think Windows defines the brand much like how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it.
What I am curious about is what happens when the original product that makes the company popular starts to experience poor quality. Take Google for example, its search has been on a decline in the last decade or so and needless to say the company is experiencing problems as well in the last few years. While GCP and GSuite are significant, people have lost faith in Google which probably started with search.
Windows 11 and the iPhone seem to be heading towards same fate as Google search imo.
The only people losing faith in Google (search) are power users such as us. Regular users haven't noticed the decline, and search may even have improved for them. We are not Google Search's target audience. We need to stop pretending all products are built for the power user niche.
My wife is an opposite of power user and she now uses mostly chatgpt for anything more complex. The ease with fluent sentence search compared to trying to fit those few right terms that google search would understand, not overdo it, avoid over-SEO-ed pages... google search has been gamed for so long it became victim of its own success. It just has momentum but thats waning.
Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to something else but right now its night and day even for common folks. Who cares knows it.
Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search like nytimes with their paid very selective biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.
For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the products they test and they don't take gifts or manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising. They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants, and have been in existence for 89 years.
Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14 manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.
Still, from all computing platforms that I have used since my humble Timex 2068 in 1986, Windows is where I have most fun, despite all the ongoing issues.
"Remember when things were not insanely bloated and we all knew what we were collectively doing?" they all said, a wistful tear developing in each of their eyes, nobody daring to release theirs first.
Nah, Happy Anniversary, Microsoft. As much as we do not get along, you did do _some_ good in the world.
[...] "Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge. They are a company with vicious, predatory, anti-competitive business practices, and always have been. They also happen to make terrible products, and always have. I do not use any Microsoft products, and neither should you." - Jamie Zawinski
That guy hates MS because they included a web browser with their OS? Then he complains about being sent porn when he asks people to stop redistribution of his permissively licensed project while he shows me a hairy scrotum.
I joined MSFT ~25 years ago and worked there for 10 years. It was a great place to work. Everybody (in Redmond) had their offices, great outdoor areas for walking and meeting people, great conference areas, decent and relatively affordable places to live nearby (some within walking distance), some of the best Engineers in the world etc. I don't think there is a company life like MSFT used to have anywhere on Earth nowadays. :(
What struck me most in this piece wasn't just the milestones or big product moments, but how human the journey was. From someone getting hired off a newsletter in a Honda Civic to negotiating with the Rolling Stones, or building a global business with zero prior international experience. It's a reminder that behind all the megacorp mythology, these were regular people taking huge risks.
I remember exactly that moment I first saw a Windows 95 bootup.
First the new _animated_ boot splash with the ms-logo, then the elegant start up piano sound, the amazing new start button with a menu with so perfectly organized applications, settings and a run input. It was like stepping into the future.
Windows 3.11 and dos 6.22 was normal yesterday, it worked, was cool and had all the stuff I loved to do - but after this day they felt dated and ancient.
> First the new _animated_ boot splash with the ms-logo, then the elegant start up piano sound, the amazing new start button with a menu with so perfectly organized applications, settings and a run input. It was like stepping into the future.
Sadly that future is now behind us. Nowadays I struggle to figure out what is a button, excuse me, clickable.
More like stepping into the past with things that the Mac, Amiga and NeXT machines could do out-of-the-box in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I mean, 8.3 file names? Seriously? Who thought that these could be "user friendly"?
There are so few books on early Microsoft, and they're all so fascinating. One I like is Microsoft: First Generation. One I think is humorous, but not that informative, is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.
Maybe after all the whole story is not that fascinating?
Bill was coming from the wealthy family, his mum was IBM VP and gave his son a contract to sell operating system, even though there were better alternatives on the market. Ye good ol' story about corporate corruption that gave us such amazing products like Internet Explorer 6, Windows 98 Millenium Edition or Windows Vista.
We could've lived in a so much better World if we didn't have to deal for years with crappy Microsoft operating system and other MS products.
Microserfs is pretty fun, though the details are fictional. What stuck in my mind is that they spent so much effort clawing their way to the top, and when they were there, they didn't know what to do anymore and lost their way. Microsoft was a mess for 15 years or so.
I read Hard Drive by James Wallace and Jim Erickson a couple years ago. It was written between Windows 3.1 and 95. Super interesting to read Microsoft history from the perspective of that time period. I loved it.
Hard Drive, ostensibly about Bill Gates, was a great read when I was a kid. I recommend ‘Microserfs’ from Douglas Coupland as a fictional (but grounded) homage to the work in the 90s.
This is a build or test lab, not the offices of developers. I visited multiple times in the period mentioned for the picture, and saw multiple of these. The one I saw most often was the NT build lab. When I started there in the mid-2000s, these labs were still used, although the build labs were a little less densely packed thanks to remote tools.
This picture without context gave me QA or build lab type vibes, and the caption in the story confirmed that. They had to test on all kinds of configurations and hardware, so this makes sense- tbh I am surprised its this small. Remote tools didn't really exist in those days, and even if they did, they are unlikely to work if the OS is having issues. So you run a test, find an issue, and if its hard to reproduce you might just have to bring the dev into the lab to get on the box to understand what happened.
It looks very similar to a QA Lab at a place I worked at in the early 2000s. They essentially commandeered a larger conference room and there were just (cpu) boxes everywhere.
The caption says 1995, so this is most definitely one of the test labs. We used to have rows of shelves with PCs in various hardware configurations that were tested with daily builds.
Everyone did have their own offices in the early-mid 90s. By the late 90s we were sharing, depending on seniority (years in the company, not title, which was refreshing).
That's absurd. Trailblazer means a pioneer; an innovator. Apple is one. Microsoft isn't. Microsoft is known for copying ideas, not for innovating. If there is one thing that hasn't changed in 50 years, it is the fact that they don't innovate. Take their recent products: Teams is a copy of Slack. Loop is a copy of Notion. This has been going on throughout their history. .NET is a copy of Java. Windows is a copy of MacOS. Excel is a copy of Visicalc and Lotus 123, Word is a copy of WordStar and WordPerfect, PowerPoint a copy of Harvard Graphics and Aldus Persuasion, and Access a copy of dBASE and FoxPro.
What about Microsoft makes them not innovate? To innovate you have to hire smart developers and let them do what they love doing. This will result in some waste, as only some of the ideas will be successful financially. But the ones that succeed will be innovative. Microsoft doesn't do that. They hire good developers and assign them to a Program Manager who gives them a fully nailed-down spec for what to build. Inevitably the Program Manager (who are often business people) will find financially successful products to clone. This rarely results in waste as the product they are cloning has already created a market, Microsoft only needs to take the market from the innovator, which they do by bundling the product with either Office or Windows.
>What’s cool about the Dutch East India Company and Standard Oil is that there will never be another company like those two. They are true trailblazers in so many ways.
It's interesting that Microsoft was founded almost exactly a year before Apple (April 1st, 1976). I can't imagine Apple will miss the opportunity to make a big deal out of it.
When I was at uni in NZ (mid 70s) me and my friends wrote a compiler for 6800s (an algol subset, it fit in 2k), we wrote it with copyrights for "uSoft" (that's a greek mu), in retrospect it was an obvious name at the time.
Later we discovered some other guys using the same name in the US (also with a mu) they had a basic interpreter, how lame! (we had a compiler) however we really didn't understand the advantages of being born in the right place .....
I really wish we'd incorporated, we could have sold the name for some silly amount of money
Not just "incorporated", you would also have to have ported it to various computers that were sold (as MSFT did - and that Bill Gates' parents were lawyers with IBM contacts helped a lot).
NZ is a fantastic country, but is relatively remote from larger markets, and its own population isn't large enough for the economics of scale to apply only locally. So even if you had tried, you may have failed. As you rightly say, power of location. On the other hand, now, due to globalization, things are possible there, too - for example, the app market is not limited geographically.
BTW, you should consider uploading your old compiler's code on GitHub if you still have it; there is increased interest in "software archeology" now, given that so many emulators have been built.
I was more talking about owning the name in NZ (and maybe Oz)
The software source was on cards (developed on a simulator on a uni mainframe, much like Microsoft were developing their code), sadly the cards were left behind when I moved to the US a decade later
If you read Bill Gates' biography, you'll learn that he had an incredible foundation. A big part of that was his parents and grandmother, who not only loved him deeply but also nurtured his passions — enrolling him in a private school, taking him to therapy, driving him to many extracurriculars such as those done by the Scouts, and helping him develop social skills with the members of his community.
But it wasn’t just his parents. His broader community and the environment he grew up in also played a key role in setting him up for success in ways that many others, may not have experienced. For example, from early on he had access to a PDP-10 and was allowed to practice programming from a very young age.
Not to undersell Gates, the guy was incredibly intelligent and hardworking, but the conditions he was raised in definitely gave him a head start. He had opportunities that were rare at the time, and an incredible support system that helped him develop his potential.
That's such a great story and such a classic case of being just ahead of the curve but in the wrong corner of the world.
I worked in a digital technology company in Wellington in the 90s and one of our key technologies that we sold was a hosted form on a secure (remember, this is the era that https was not common) website to collect credit card payments. We were a proto Stripe in the year 1999 but totally in the wrong place in the world to take advantage of it.
May have been the wrong time too. 1999 was chock full of companies that failed to get traction and died during the dot-com collapse, but variants became much more successful 20 years later. Much of this was mostly waiting in infrastructure I suspect.
It's wild how many brilliant ideas popped up just before their time or in places that didn't have the ecosystem to scale them
It's also almost 50 years since "An Open Letter to Hobbyists"[1]. It's amazing that in the last 30+ years, the "hobbyists" managed to turn the entire software industry by 180°, and that Microsoft themselves are reliant on that work.
Bill even specifically mentions musicians. By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it. Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
[2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
> Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].
> [2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
Nice try ChatGPT stealing from studio ghibli and Scarlett Johansson are still two egregious examples of what can kill artist's motivations. Why create or publish if credit is not given?
True, virtually all companies harvesting LLM training datasets don't bother honouring even the most permissive licenses, like MIT or BSD - Microsoft leading the pack with Github and Copilot.
You're right to point out that the tide is shifting again. Perhaps at the end of this bubble, society and/or the behemoth companies will recognise the value and help build a more sustainable future for artists and creators. I'm cautiously optimistic.
> Why create or publish if credit is not given?
That is true for content creators. Real artists don’t have a choice. They have to create art.
Downvote for low quality "nice try".
Devils advocate: Imagine how much richer developers would have been today if software wasn't copied as much as it is today. Companies would have to pay developers to write it (we probably wouldn't have as much overall growth but devs would be richer). AI also wouldn't have been able to replace us if it was more secretive and proprietary.
Imagine how much public good can be done if the government had public software works project that did not need to rely on advertising to be useful while serving everyone (not just a boardroom of millionaires).
Almost like if there was a centralized source code registry that can diff identify code reuse path?
Ironic that Microsoft GitHub is so close to that
>By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it.
I do enjoy some Led Zeppelin, and I often enjoy the artists they didn't credit, even more.
And now most of those hobbists are going back to commercial licenses, because other hobbists don't pay them, and there are bills to pay.
> And now most of those hobbists are going back to commercial licenses
It seems to be specifically the "hobbyists" that are also taking VC investment money for their "hobby project". It's pretty clear what's driving these decisions: VC's are not okay with a bootstrapped, penny-pinching business focusing on specialized support or custom development (which is the successful RedHat model), they want an early chance at really outsized returns.
Back in the day that letter was relevant we used to sell little tools via ads on magazines like BYTE, Dr Dobbs Journal and co, occasionally get nice money out of it.
Also in the early BSD/Linux days, there were distributors like Walnut Creek, Amiga had Fish Disks, and so forth, some money could eventually go back to tool writers.
It isn't only about VC money.
While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore, I think Windows defines the brand much like how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it.
What I am curious about is what happens when the original product that makes the company popular starts to experience poor quality. Take Google for example, its search has been on a decline in the last decade or so and needless to say the company is experiencing problems as well in the last few years. While GCP and GSuite are significant, people have lost faith in Google which probably started with search.
Windows 11 and the iPhone seem to be heading towards same fate as Google search imo.
The only people losing faith in Google (search) are power users such as us. Regular users haven't noticed the decline, and search may even have improved for them. We are not Google Search's target audience. We need to stop pretending all products are built for the power user niche.
My wife is an opposite of power user and she now uses mostly chatgpt for anything more complex. The ease with fluent sentence search compared to trying to fit those few right terms that google search would understand, not overdo it, avoid over-SEO-ed pages... google search has been gamed for so long it became victim of its own success. It just has momentum but thats waning.
Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to something else but right now its night and day even for common folks. Who cares knows it.
Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search like nytimes with their paid very selective biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.
> we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner
For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the products they test and they don't take gifts or manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising. They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants, and have been in existence for 89 years.
Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14 manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.
https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-cleaners/r...
> While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore
It’s hasn’t been for 25+ years (more than 50% of Microsoft existence).
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar00/mdna.htmGoogle’s product is ads and GCP is an insignificant player in the cloud space. When I was at AWS ProServe, we never took GCP as a serious competitor.
GSuite still hasn’t made any inroads into the enterprise of governments where the money is.
Still, from all computing platforms that I have used since my humble Timex 2068 in 1986, Windows is where I have most fun, despite all the ongoing issues.
> how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it
iPhone defines Apple, and that is justified considering the single product makes up 55% of the company's revenue.
How is iPhone headings towards a similar fate?
The flagship product may no longer be the main revenue driver, but it still defines the brand in people's minds
"Remember when things were not insanely bloated and we all knew what we were collectively doing?" they all said, a wistful tear developing in each of their eyes, nobody daring to release theirs first.
Nah, Happy Anniversary, Microsoft. As much as we do not get along, you did do _some_ good in the world.
[...] "Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge. They are a company with vicious, predatory, anti-competitive business practices, and always have been. They also happen to make terrible products, and always have. I do not use any Microsoft products, and neither should you." - Jamie Zawinski
https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-windows.html
That guy hates MS because they included a web browser with their OS? Then he complains about being sent porn when he asks people to stop redistribution of his permissively licensed project while he shows me a hairy scrotum.
Seems a little irrational.
I joined MSFT ~25 years ago and worked there for 10 years. It was a great place to work. Everybody (in Redmond) had their offices, great outdoor areas for walking and meeting people, great conference areas, decent and relatively affordable places to live nearby (some within walking distance), some of the best Engineers in the world etc. I don't think there is a company life like MSFT used to have anywhere on Earth nowadays. :(
What struck me most in this piece wasn't just the milestones or big product moments, but how human the journey was. From someone getting hired off a newsletter in a Honda Civic to negotiating with the Rolling Stones, or building a global business with zero prior international experience. It's a reminder that behind all the megacorp mythology, these were regular people taking huge risks.
I remember exactly that moment I first saw a Windows 95 bootup.
First the new _animated_ boot splash with the ms-logo, then the elegant start up piano sound, the amazing new start button with a menu with so perfectly organized applications, settings and a run input. It was like stepping into the future.
Windows 3.11 and dos 6.22 was normal yesterday, it worked, was cool and had all the stuff I loved to do - but after this day they felt dated and ancient.
Such moments are rare. Microsoft rocked so hard
> First the new _animated_ boot splash with the ms-logo, then the elegant start up piano sound, the amazing new start button with a menu with so perfectly organized applications, settings and a run input. It was like stepping into the future.
Sadly that future is now behind us. Nowadays I struggle to figure out what is a button, excuse me, clickable.
One of my favourite memories of Windows 95 was - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc. It felt absolutely futuristic watching a video from a CD at that time.
I have similar vivid memories. I saw win 95 first in my room mate’s PC. I was completely blown away, like “what sorcery is this” level of mind blown.
> It was like stepping into the future.
More like stepping into the past with things that the Mac, Amiga and NeXT machines could do out-of-the-box in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I mean, 8.3 file names? Seriously? Who thought that these could be "user friendly"?
There are so few books on early Microsoft, and they're all so fascinating. One I like is Microsoft: First Generation. One I think is humorous, but not that informative, is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.
Maybe after all the whole story is not that fascinating?
Bill was coming from the wealthy family, his mum was IBM VP and gave his son a contract to sell operating system, even though there were better alternatives on the market. Ye good ol' story about corporate corruption that gave us such amazing products like Internet Explorer 6, Windows 98 Millenium Edition or Windows Vista.
We could've lived in a so much better World if we didn't have to deal for years with crappy Microsoft operating system and other MS products.
Microserfs is pretty fun, though the details are fictional. What stuck in my mind is that they spent so much effort clawing their way to the top, and when they were there, they didn't know what to do anymore and lost their way. Microsoft was a mess for 15 years or so.
try Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World. By Charles H. Ferguson from 1993. The author is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ferguson_(filmmaker) this one
I read Hard Drive by James Wallace and Jim Erickson a couple years ago. It was written between Windows 3.1 and 95. Super interesting to read Microsoft history from the perspective of that time period. I loved it.
Hard Drive, ostensibly about Bill Gates, was a great read when I was a kid. I recommend ‘Microserfs’ from Douglas Coupland as a fictional (but grounded) homage to the work in the 90s.
https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/0...
This development environment looks interesting：why two shelves?
Also the place look like a cheap airline cabin. I thought all MSFT employees have their own offices back then. Maybe it's because that's the lab?
This is a build or test lab, not the offices of developers. I visited multiple times in the period mentioned for the picture, and saw multiple of these. The one I saw most often was the NT build lab. When I started there in the mid-2000s, these labs were still used, although the build labs were a little less densely packed thanks to remote tools.
This picture without context gave me QA or build lab type vibes, and the caption in the story confirmed that. They had to test on all kinds of configurations and hardware, so this makes sense- tbh I am surprised its this small. Remote tools didn't really exist in those days, and even if they did, they are unlikely to work if the OS is having issues. So you run a test, find an issue, and if its hard to reproduce you might just have to bring the dev into the lab to get on the box to understand what happened.
It looks very similar to a QA Lab at a place I worked at in the early 2000s. They essentially commandeered a larger conference room and there were just (cpu) boxes everywhere.
The caption says 1995, so this is most definitely one of the test labs. We used to have rows of shelves with PCs in various hardware configurations that were tested with daily builds.
Everyone did have their own offices in the early-mid 90s. By the late 90s we were sharing, depending on seniority (years in the company, not title, which was refreshing).
https://archive.ph/WIAoq
I loved how the Windows 95 install CD had Weezer's Buddy Holly video on it. I remember finding it and thinking it was so cool they did that.
And the trailer to Rob Roy. (Why do I even remember this??) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al8YJGwn9Y8
Actual Code https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...
No Microsoft, no Half-Life.
What’s cool about MSFT and APPLE is that there will never be another company like those two. They are true trailblazers in so many ways.
That's absurd. Trailblazer means a pioneer; an innovator. Apple is one. Microsoft isn't. Microsoft is known for copying ideas, not for innovating. If there is one thing that hasn't changed in 50 years, it is the fact that they don't innovate. Take their recent products: Teams is a copy of Slack. Loop is a copy of Notion. This has been going on throughout their history. .NET is a copy of Java. Windows is a copy of MacOS. Excel is a copy of Visicalc and Lotus 123, Word is a copy of WordStar and WordPerfect, PowerPoint a copy of Harvard Graphics and Aldus Persuasion, and Access a copy of dBASE and FoxPro.
What about Microsoft makes them not innovate? To innovate you have to hire smart developers and let them do what they love doing. This will result in some waste, as only some of the ideas will be successful financially. But the ones that succeed will be innovative. Microsoft doesn't do that. They hire good developers and assign them to a Program Manager who gives them a fully nailed-down spec for what to build. Inevitably the Program Manager (who are often business people) will find financially successful products to clone. This rarely results in waste as the product they are cloning has already created a market, Microsoft only needs to take the market from the innovator, which they do by bundling the product with either Office or Windows.
>What’s cool about the Dutch East India Company and Standard Oil is that there will never be another company like those two. They are true trailblazers in so many ways.
Amazon? Google? Meta? Tencent? etc etc etc
It's interesting that Microsoft was founded almost exactly a year before Apple (April 1st, 1976). I can't imagine Apple will miss the opportunity to make a big deal out of it.
Crazy to think how Microsoft went from a small startup to one of the biggest companies in the world. Wonder what the next 50 years will look like.
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Funny that they changed their name from 'Micro-Soft' to Microsoft.
Windows Recall