Blast from the Past: Monad (Premium)

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.

But I also have my notes from that first meeting, numerous pre-release presentations, including one given to MVPs at the April 2004 MVP Global Summit that tracks very closely to what Microsoft discussed to us about a year and a half earlier. Snover and Microsoft had clearly been honing the message on Monad/PowerShell for some time.

Anywhere. Let’s jump in. I’ll add a few annotations in bold where it makes sense.
Bridging the Developer/Admin Gap
August 10, 2010

Way back in late 2002, I toured the country with Mark Minasi as part of a Microsoft-sponsored security roadshow. It was a blast for a number of reasons, but one of the more interesting things we did, but couldn't discuss at the time, involved a side-trip to the Microsoft campus. There, we got a very early preview of Monad, which went on to become Windows PowerShell. We were told that Monad was a way for Microsoft to bridge the gap between the command prompt/Windows Scripting Host environments then offered in Windows with the BASH-type shells common in Linux/UNIX. "UNIX has been kicking our butts within the scripting world," we were told.
We were told that by Darrell Ray, a lead program manager for Monad, according to my notes. Here’s the exact quote as recorded in those notes:

“Jeff and I conceived Monad as a way to deliver a rich command line scripting environment in Windows, like BASH not WSH [Windows Scripting Host]. Within the scripting world, UNIX has been kicking our butts. But with Monad, we won’t just meet UNIX, but leapfrog it. This was received [internally] with healthy skepticism.”
OK, I thought, but so what? The reason Windows had become so popular in the server realm as well as on the desktop was the GUI: In fact, early versions of Windows NT Server were specifically designed to let Windows end-users become Windows IT pros and admins, thanks to the familiar GUI. Where UNIX and Linux were inherently command line systems with a GUI on top, Windows was designed the other way around. So while there were (and still are) some things you can do from the command line in UNIX that aren't possible with a GUI, the reverse has histori...

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