History of Microsoft Windows

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History of Microsoft Windows
Nicholas Charter
Section 48693

There are over one billion computers in the world running the Windows operating system. The company responsible for this enormous feat has been ever growing since its creation on April 4, 1975 by the brilliant minds of Paul Alan and Bill Gates. This company is of course, the one and only, Microsoft.
It all started with the Atari 8000, and Bill and Alan’s quest to acquire a contract with the manufactures, MITS, to incorporate the programming language, BASIC. Through the rest of the last seventies and early eighties, Microsoft’s products were mainly based around BASIC, but for the other competitors in the computing world, such as the Commodore 64 and the Apple II.
UNIX, an operating system developed in 1969 by AT&T, has licensed out variants of its original works over the years, the most commonly known is the still licensed, Mac OSX, and the various forms of the open source OS, Linux. But this too is where Microsoft began its venture into the OS market in 1980 when a variant was obtained and dubbed, Xenix. Xenix became the first the rum the immensely successful word processing program, Multi-Tool Word, now Microsoft Word. In 1980 Microsoft was approached by the big time company, IBM, with the task of developing a new OS. In response, MS-DOS, short for Microsoft – Disk Operating System, was developed. This severely changed the way computing was done, with the introduction of the “C:” Language, descendants of which are still used today. But while this was extremely effective for professionals, this was not the kind of system the everyday person could use due mostly to its solely text based interface, and thusly the need for a graphically based interface began. The first v...

... middle of paper ...

...over a decade, while still keeping it available through a button on the taskbar, the main interface is comprised of blocks that make the programs more like the apps you would find on mobile devices rather than on a typical computer.

Works Cited

• Bailey, David. "Opening up Microsoft." UNIX Review June 1997: 23+. Computer Database. Web. 22 Feb. 2013.
• Bellis, Mary. "The Unusual History of Microsoft Windows." About.com Inventors. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2013.
• Honan, Mat. "Microsoft." Wired May 2013: 110. Computer Database. Web. 22 Feb. 2013.
• Leonhard, Woody. "Microsoft's 13 worst missteps of all time; DOS 4.0, Zune, and Windows 8 are but a few of the landmarks among 25 years of failures Redmond-style." InfoWorld.com 14 Jan. 2013. Computer Database. Web. 04 Mar. 2013.
• Todea, Lucian. "Soft32.com News." Soft32com News. N.p., 16 June 2006. Web. 04 March. 2013.

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