Programming Windows

Microsoft created VBScript as a simpler alternative to JavaScript that was based on its vast…

Microsoft announced ActiveX---or as it was originally called, ActiveX Technologies---in March 1996 as a way…

HTML---the Hypertext Markup Language---is a simple markup language that describes the structure and contents of…

While most histories of Microsoft focus on two obvious areas of general interest---the company’s founding…

Microsoft chief scientist Nathan Myhrvold opined in an internal email in 1992 that the software…

It was late 1994, and Microsoft was shopping around for a web browser. It was…

The success of Windows 3.0 and 3.1 had catapulted one of Microsoft’s biggest embarrassments into…

Visual J++ is a historical footnote today, but it’s fascinating to go back and see…

Fearing that Microsoft would try to undermine Java by creating incompatible versions that only ran…

Bill Gates had finally gotten the message: The Internet wasn’t just important; it was the…

The origin of JavaScript is one of the more interesting stories I’ve come across while…

Bill Gates may have missed the Internet threat. But he can’t say he wasn’t warned.…

While Bill Gates and Microsoft were laser-focused on bringing Windows 95 to market in 1994-1995,…

Windows NT was released in 1993 and was described by First Boston as “the most…

James Gosling never intended to write a new programming language. Instead, he was trying to…

In early 1991, engineers at Sun Microsystems created a small team to discover whether there…