Gadgetory

this episode of tech wiki is best viewed in Internet Explorer 11 just kidding but it wasn't too long ago that Microsoft's position in the market was so dominant that nearly everyone was using ie anyways along with Windows Office and that space-cadet pinball game that was actually awesome so just how did Microsoft become the face of the software industry before Google was even a glint in Larry page's eye well it started back in 1975 when Bill Gates and Paul Allen wanted to get the programming language basic working on their Altair 8800 the first successful PC blown with the little lights and switches on the front that was programmed directly by toggling them they believed a basic interpreter would make it a lot easier for people to program on the Altair using a keyboard what a concept this interpreter called Altair basic was Microsoft's first ever product and it took up just four kilobytes on paper tape it proved to be so popular that Bill Gates sent a very angry letter to hobbyists telling them to stop copying it and passing it around for free unfortunately for Bill product activation was still a few decades away but that's ok it didn't stop Microsoft from growing and developing many more forms of basic through the early 1980s which served not only as programming environments but also as proto operating systems for home computers of the time Microsoft also launched its first-ever piece of hardware in 1980 called the soft card which allowed the operating system CPM which later evolved into das to run on Apple computers sound familiar anyway speaking of DOS Microsoft agreed to produce dos for IBM in 1981 which quickly made Microsoft a software giant their yulie revenue raised from 16 million in 1981 to over 97 million a mere three years later in 1984 this number was also bolstered by the introduction of Microsoft Word in 1983 which was notable for being one of the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processors meaning you could see formatting like italics on screen instead of having to type in a command later to get the printer to print the font that you want and Microsoft continued to roll with the whole idea of making things on the monitor look nicer when they released Windows 1.0 in 1985 and while this initial version of Windows was really just a graphical shell that ran on top of ms-dos it was still ahead of its time in some ways for example it was widely criticized for relying too much on the mouse since most computers in 1985 didn't even have them yet but Bill Gates who previously announced that the company would focus firmly on Windows was undeterred and five years later in 1990 windows 3.0 was released and was a smashing success thanks in no small part to the use of real actual icons to represent programs and files and a support for a whopping 256 colors the original version of Microsoft Office was also released this year and was similarly successful though some of Microsoft's productivity software rivals cried foul because Microsoft's knowledge of Windows supposedly allowed them to make office run better on Windows than the competition whatever the truth was Windows became the world's most popular graphical OS in 1993 with office becoming the market leader in productivity applications a year later so with all this success the stage was very much set for the much-ballyhooed Windows 95 release in you guessed it 1995 which included many enduring features like the Start menu the modern Windows desktop paradigm and the taskbar this along with Microsoft's growing portfolio of consumer products like Encarta Internet Explorer and MSN which is still around is a dial-up provider and a web portal quickly turned Microsoft into a household name and a mainstay on both home and office pcs worldwide they even invited our TVs partnering with General Electric to launch MSNBC in 1996 a cable news channel that emphasized interactivity and online news to complement its TV offerings in its early days of course Microsoft's market dominance raised some eyebrows especially when they bundled Internet Explorer with Windows 98 and treated the browser as an part of the operating system certain elements of Windows wouldn't run properly without ie this escalated to the point where the US government nearly broke Microsoft into two companies in 2000 though this was avoided through a settlement while this litigation was going on Microsoft rolled out Windows ME which was so buggy that PC world joked that Emmy stood for mistake edition but Redmond quickly righted itself in 2001 releasing the venerable Windows XP the first Windows version for consumers that ditched ms-dos which ran underneath Windows 90 X using the much more stable Windows NT kernel which was previously only intended for business use that same year Microsoft dove headfirst into the game console wars releasing the original Xbox is a big fu to Sony whose PlayStation product line was driving game developers away from windows and although the Xbox may have been a little big and looked a little tacky it was ahead of its time in a number of ways being the first causal to include an Ethernet jack and a hard drive so by this point it's clear that Microsoft was trying to diversify their business in areas other than just the traditional PC software space but unfortunately if we went into all of Microsoft's post 2001 successes and missteps this wouldn't really be a tech quickie episode it'd be like a tech long episode so let us know in the comments what you'd like to see us cover in a follow up modern history of Microsoft episode tunnel Bayer VPN lets you tunnel to 20 different countries allowing you to browse the Internet and use online services as if you're in a different country they have easy-to-use apps for iOS Android PC and Mac and they also have a Chrome extension just choose a country turn tunnel bear on and watch as your bear tunnels your internet connection to a new location when you do turn tile bear on two things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and your public IP address gets switched so you can show up as if you're in said different country tunnel Bayer handles all the messy stuff in the background and they have a top rated privacy policy and do not log user activity you can tunnelled their VPN with 500 megabytes of free data and with no credit card required and if you choose to get a year of unlimited data you can save 10% by going to tunnel bear comm slash Linus thanks for watching guys if you liked this video like it you just like this video dislike it check out channel super-fun if you want to like break from learning things and down below if you have any ideas of stuff that we should cover on this channel like the history of something let us know and we'll look into that see you guys next time