Microsoft was founded 50 years ago this coming April. Most of you are somewhat familiar with their origin story that began with a small office in Albuquerque by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And thanks to this series in Geekwire, you can read about things from their perspective. This series has inspired my own POV.

Back in the spring of 1975, I was finishing up college in New York. The only computers I had access to were mainframes. When I got to grad school a few years later, we had a time-sharing system. That meant getting up at the crack of dawn or waiting until the middle of night to go across campus and sit in front of a monochrome character-mode terminal. The odd hours were caused by their popularity during the day. When I got my first post-grad-school job in DC, I used a downtown “remote job entry” storefront (I think it was on K Street, but don’t hold me to that) where I could submit my decks of punched cards and come back the next day to see if my programs had run without errors. (They usually took a few tries, just so you know.)

My first actual PC was an HP 85 running CPM, somewhere around 1979. I was using it to build math models for various consulting clients, and the models were built using Visicalc, the original digital spreadsheet. It had all of 8K of RAM, an amount of memory so small you can’t even buy it in a basic digital watch today.

My first interaction with Microsoft was IBM PC DOS in 1981. It would take several years before I joined PC Week in the mid-1980s, when I got my first breakout job there (now known as eWeek). Then I began using Microsoft’s local area network software, called LAN Manager, that it built to run on 3Com’s servers. The LAN Man era accounted for one of my favorite PC Week cover stories back then: we wrote about how anyone could take over a server with a simple boot floppy which granted unrestricted physical access to the machine. Ah, those were the days!

It was at PC Week that I began to develop relationships with many of the MSFT execs, including Ballmer and Gates, as we went around the country to various events and covered major product launches. It was a heady time for a former anonymous corporate user, now blessed with a huge expense account.

I got side tracked during this time period with OS/2, the failed IBM and Microsoft operating system project that resulted in a book deal for me (which remains unpublished) and a new server operating system for Microsoft called Windows NT. NT had an enduring and somewhat troubling legacy, which I first wrote about in 2003. I still have a soft spot in my keyboard for it.

NT is the OS that keeps on giving, as I recently updated a post for CSOonline about its infamous and enduring NTLM protocol, a favorite of hackers through the ages because it basically doesn’t require any authentication.

During the 1990s, Microsoft (along with many of us) discovered the web, or as we called it then, The Web. Microsoft stumbled here as well, trying to make the web its own proprietary playground, as I wrote about in 1998. This would be a common theme, one that I called attention to when ActiveX was on its way out in the mid 2000s for dynamic content. They tried and failed to squash the upstart browser innovator Netscape with their own Internet Explorer. That eventually failed and now Microsoft’s Edge browser is based on Google’s Chromium.

It was during this decade that Microsoft began to understand the open-source community. Some of this understanding was the result of court judgements (at one point in time, the company had 130 lawsuits to deal with), and some due to a transformation of its collective engineering mindset. I went to one of its 2007 conferences where it was clear that it still had  a love/hate relationship with the internet and viewed many OSS projects as competitors for its own commercial products. You can see how that attitude has changed somewhat on this current splash page, where they claim to use thousands of OSS projects every day.

It was also in 2008 that Gates announced his retirement, and where I developed a clever speaking gig giving thanks to him for making my career so interesting. The speech is somewhat tongue-in-cheek: if Microsoft had made better products or gotten on board trends sooner, I would have had a more boring arc in writing my stories, not to mention fewer support issues. Remember Bob and Clippy? Windows 8 and ME?

Thanks to all of you for reading my work over the years, and sharing your own MSFT memories along the way.