With the release this week of PowerShell 7, I’m thinking back to this automation environment's early days as a Longhorn Server project called Monad. And as it turns out, I learned about Monad---and met its creator, Jeffrey Snover, in late 2002, well before it was announced and several years before it was released.

I have a lot of Monad pre-release information in my archives, but I thought I’d share the following two editorials because they together tell the most important parts of this story. The first is an August 2010 retrospective that details Microsoft’s first disclosure to me and a co-worker, and I believe this represents one of the first, if not the first, times that Monad was discussed with company outsiders. The second is from February 2007 and discusses the then-coming initial release of Windows PowerShell.