A Microsoft-Speak Timeline - From Altair to Zune

netbuzz writes "No company has had more to say about software over the past 30 years than Microsoft (for better or worse). How they've said it — the actual language used — reveals a lot about the company's evolution and is the focus of a new timeline. There's a look back at a 'tag cloud' provided by the Seattle P-I. In addition to analyzing the linguistics of about 90 documents, there are also links to such gems as Bill Gates' Playboy interview and his famous 'Open Letters to Hobbyists.' From the article: 'We're talking all the way from Altair to Zune, with stops along the way for every technology the company developed, bought or borrowed, right on through to current entanglements with Vista, Linux and Google. The tool allows for an at-a-glance view of company priorities as they evolve and shift.'"

The most surprising thing to me

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Was the missing three years- just what in the hell was Microsoft doing from 1977 to 1980 anyway?

Re:The most surprising thing to me

[camperdave]

Was the missing three years- just what in the hell was Microsoft doing from 1977 to 1980 anyway?

Downloading CPM on a 300 baud acoustic modem?

Re:

[__aaclcg7560]

They were probably watching Star Wars and figuring out if they have enough computational power to design themselves a deathstar. I doubt they were listening to the Bee Gees.

Re:

[Orange Crush]

Was the missing three years- just what in the hell was Microsoft doing from 1977 to 1980 anyway?

Bill was understudying with Jim Henson for Kermit in case the whole software thing didn't pan out.

Re:

[jbrader]

cocaine

Re:

[dryeo]

Well one thing that occurred to me was the one MS product I actually bought. The Microsoft Softcard (http://apple2history.org/museum/peripheralcards_ n onapple/softcard.html) which was actually released in Mar of 1980. Always wondered if MS actually engineered this or bought it from someone else.
Ah, digging up the manual it lists Don Burtis of Burtronix as the designer and Vista Computer Co as the manufacturer. Guess this where Vista's name comes from :)
Also I'm sure they were also working on various forms o

Re:

[default luser]

Oh, MS was busy selling away their Basic on the 6502 for a song. [wikipedia.org]

From the same page, Apple also got a similar deal on 6502 Basic for the Apple II. MS sure didn't make that mistake again with IBM.

Keep on getting away with it...

[PurifyYourMind]

Just like with politicians or rich movie stars, there's a giant marketing machine that can erase past wrongs/lies/etc. by blasting the message of the week. Even when you catch them in a blatant lie, with evidence--like those Jon Stewart clips comparing what Bush said a few years ago to what he says now--they can shrug it off, because they know people will A) forget or B) only get exposed to the message of the week or C) be too cynical/disillusioned to act.

Re:

[alexhs]

people will A) forget or B) only get exposed to the message of the week or C) be too cynical/disillusioned to act.

and don't forget :

D) pretend the non-mainstream message is a lie.

(somewhat related to B : if you say something loud enough it becomes the truth...)

Re:

[Sique]

I think the U.S. opinion makers are much too obsessed with what people have said in other times, in other circumstances and with other knowledge. The usus to pull out obscure sources from 25 years ago to bash it on people looks pretty pervert to me.
It seems to me that they live under the presumption that

• there are never any errors in judgement.
• people should never admit errors in judgement.
• people who ever err in judgement are bad to the cores and should be thrown out.
• there are no new developments possible whi

Re:

[node 3]

We're not talking about "silly babble from yesterday", we're talking about people *lying* about what they said in the past.

John Kerry admits he changed his mind, and he's skewered in the media.

George Bush lies about saying Saddam had WMDs, was tied to Al Qaida, and whether he ever said "stay the course", and no one cares.

It's not that the past shouldn't matter, it definitely should. It's just that it shouldn't be used as a meaningless gimmick. As it stands, our media plays it completely backwards.

Re:

[Sique]

That's exactly what I am talking about. To pass the mustering of the opinion makers you have to reinterpret your past, you have to lie about it and you should never, ever admit that in the past you might have been wrong, because no one will believe you if you say that you have learned from your mistakes. You have to be perfect from birth, even if the perfection is retroactively fitted on your past.

Re:

[Skrynesaver]

To quote John Maynard-Keynes,

When the facts on the ground change, I change my mind, what do you do?

Having held in the past opinions that differ from those you currently hold should be no shame, lying about what you have said/believed in the past shows a lack of intelectual honesty and integrity that is worrying in someone whose role is to interpret events and decide policy on the basis of their interpretation.

Declaration: The above opinions may be effected by my belief that the current US president is a

Re:

[whereiswaldo]

Or stop questioning how and why the 9/11 attacks happened or were allowed to happen? Why was a large - no HUGE - body of evidence ignored indicating that the towers were detonated rather than falling on their own. Watch for yourself:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=fp3FzSoMUYo [youtube.com]
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ckMWO_w4iNY [youtube.com]
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CcRs1fv8i3I [youtube.com]

It's amazing what can be covered up as time passes. Interesting when you hear declassified information which reveals how much lying the government actually has do

Like the saying goes...

[camperdave]

Like the saying goes... "There's no such thing as bad publicity"

Re:Keep on getting away with it...

[xappax]

Try embedding an Excel spreadsheet into your non-MS calendar, or pasting a MS Word doc into a non-MS email app. It doesn't work so well, does it? The incredible inter-operability and compatibility that you're describing exists because MS has direct control over all the specifications and interfaces for pretty much all the apps most people use today.

MS didn't "innovate" the idea of getting everyone to use only MS apps for everything. If any company held such a powerful monopoly, they could do something similar. MS enjoys a greater degree of compatibility and interoperability in their software because they control the whole game - the OS, the browser, the word processor, the spreadsheet, etc. are all totally under the control of MS. If a small company has a truly innovative idea, they have to fit it within the existing inflexible MS specs and APIs, or they're out of luck. Meanwhile, if MS has even the slightest idea for a new feature, they can just re-mold the entire OS and application architecture to implement it.

What if you could get better gas mileage in a Ford, but you could only use Ford gas and drive on Ford roads? Would that be considered "innovative"? Requiring people to commit themselves to a restricted proprietary environment in order to get the benefits of interoperability is a sign of lazy development at best and anti-competitive profiteering at worst - but if that's what they call "innovation" these days, who am I to argue?

Re:

[abigor]

The OP's point was that they introduced such functionality, period. Yeah, it only works with their stuff, but that's not the point. It was a genuine innovation. There's no requirement for innovation to be open and cross-platform, sorry to say. Nevertheless, OLE/COM allowed people to do things other apps would not.

Sorry, copied again

[Gr8Apes]

You do realize that OLE/COM is largely based on DDE, an IBM patented technology? And that IBM told MS that they shouldn't use it, because it was unsuited to task? And that IBM was right, as witnessed by the huge problems they've had with it?

This entire concept existed in its best form to date as SOM/DSOM on OS/2, which actually supported distributed COM objects long before MS ever got COM or DCOM to sort of work correctly.

IOW, OLE/COM is merely yet another stolen/copied subpar tech, brought to you by those

Re:

[xappax]

My point was that yes, they did introduce such functionality first, but the reason wasn't because they were technological visionaries who came up with the idea of interoperability before everyone else. Plenty of programmers and software companies had ideas about making things compatible and interoperable, but the software scene was so balkanized that it was impossible on a practical level to get all these different software vendors to cooperate on standards of interoperability.

Microsoft's advantage was (

Re:

[abigor]

What does that have to do with COM?

Obviously, MS has an abysmal security record, but I'm not sure I see the connection here, sorry.

Re:

[drew]

Sometimes I have to wonder whether this was really such a great step forward as people like to think it is. After all, when was the last time that you had a reason to embed an image in a spreadsheet in a document in your calendar? Other than just to show somebody that you could?

After all, it's innovations like this that have led to an endless stream of clients sending me screenshots as Word documents.

Re:

[jacksonj04]

Screenshots as Word documents is stupid I agree, but there are serious advantages to the functionality in Office 2003+, especially when paired with SharePoint. It makes it a lot simpler to share documents and link things together, for example making sure everybody attending a meeting has exactly the same versions of the documents, all linked to the calendar entry, even if others have changed them in the meantime.

When working solo it has very little benefit I'll admit, but in larger organisations that kind o

Re:

[flight_master]

After all, it's innovations like this that have led to an endless stream of clients sending me screenshots as Word documents.

Amen brother! This is the most annoying thing I have to deal with on a daily basis, and something I don't understand. *WHY* can't they just send the image??? Oh wait, I get it... they just PrtScn -> Paste into Word... Bleh, I'm rambling.

Re:

[Pope]

Amen brother! This is the most annoying thing I have to deal with on a daily basis, and something I don't understand. *WHY* can't they just send the image??? Oh wait, I get it... they just PrtScn -> Paste into Word... Bleh, I'm rambling.

Because they've had no training, and the company doesn't require demonstrating competancy/skills in the standard MS Office suite. You wouldn't believe how many tips/tricks I've taught to people about using Outlook, Excel, etc. after I've futzed around in the settings. an

Re:

[value_added]

And yeah, I'd say that inventing component-based systems after the world had stagnated for years piping streams of ASCII text around was quite a step, and no, I don't really see a competitor to Excel emerging until someone takes that step. Although it would be good if they did. It's easy to dismiss OLE now but at the time, it was such a vast step -- and then when it was backed up by a highly performant component system, COM, that's when the whole thing became unstoppable. With WordPerfect, you could edit a

Re:

[jbrader]

Can we get a link? So far as I know most publishers are pretty open about their submission requirements. Also is "multi-author reference book" really a representative sample of the publishing industry? Third, who are you? If you really are a published writer why are you submititng as AC?

Re:

[unitron]

"

Note that I'm not suggesting...that Word is used to typeset (although occasionally I've heard of that as well)...

"

Using Word for typesetting?

Now there's an idea on a par with trying to shave with a chainsaw. Theoretically possible, but extremely taxing on the nerves and likely to have very ugly and unpleasant results.

Re:

[Tom]

The problem is that this compatability is only within the MS monopoly. Try to Cut&Paste some Excel data into any non-MS document. Even plain text doesn't always behave as expected once you cross the boundary between MS turf and 3rd party "wilderness".

On a solid system, you cut cut&paste or drag&drop anything from anywhere to anywhere and it would at least make us much out of it as possible. The Mac has most of that working, I can mark text in Firefox, drag it to the desktop and a new text file w

Re:

[triffid_98]

That may not work 'out of the box', but via COM automation it's trivial to take excel data and export it as comma delimited text, provided your application understands how to talk Windows/COM.

The problem is that this compatability is only within the MS monopoly. Try to Cut&Paste some Excel data into any non-MS document. Even plain text doesn't always behave as expected once you cross the boundary between MS turf and 3rd party "wilderness".

Re:

[TheRaven64]

NeXT was doing embedding of objects in different applications seamlessly in a fully functional GUI back when Microsoft was still marketing overlapping windows as a shiny new feature. The earliest versions of ClarisWorks on the Mac, likewise had this kind of functionality. It is certainly not a Microsoft innovation. UNIX may have been behind, but then UNIX was behind in most things in the 80s.

ClarisWorks

[Udderdude]

I remember ClarisWorks that came with my old Performa 550. I was doing that kind of fun stuff in '93. Go Macs.

Re:

[Overly Critical Guy]

No offense, but Jon Stewart is a registered Democrat. All anyone has to do is pull up Clinton's finger-wagging "sexual relations" denial. If you're in the public eye and everything you say gets recorded, I guarantee you will say things that eventually contradict something you once said before for whatever reasons. Especially if you're a business where industry trends come and go and you have to adapt to market changes. Holding Bill Gates to a letter he wrote in 1976 is just being anal.

Re:

[rainman_bc]

All anyone has to do is pull up Clinton's finger-wagging "sexual relations" denial. If you're in the public eye and everything you say gets recorded

Give me a break. The Republicans tried to impeach Clinton for lying about that sexual relations, but no one has gone after Dubya for lying about the presence of WMD's and invading a country on false information.

I know this is off topic, and the mods will have at me for this, but I have Karma to burn...

Re:

[Sponge Bath]

Jon Stewart... pull... Clinton's... wagging sexual... things

Truth, Republican style.

TDS is a very MIXED bag

[FallLine]

Even when you catch them in a blatant lie, with evidence--like those Jon Stewart clips comparing what Bush said a few years ago to what he says now--they can shrug it off, because they know people will A) forget or B) only get exposed to the message of the week or C) be too cynical/disillusioned to act.

I watch the Daily Show fairly regularly (tivo). Though he is often funny and sometimes really pings people for lies and disingenious spin, I also think his sort of humor can be harmful to intelligent polit

Re:

[thommoose]

What the parent poster is forgetting here is the fact that TDS is on a network called, "Comedy Central." It in no way purports itself as a news station.
In fact, there's the famously funny exchange on crossfire where Stewart has to remind his hosts their show is on CNN whereas his show is followed by puppets making crank calls.

C'mon buddy--- get real... If anyone's looking to "Comedy Central" for news on what's going on in the world, they've got bigger problems than a left-wing bias- that's for damn s

Re:

[FallLine]

I'd have modded ya up anyway just for the assertion that FOX/CNN/MSNBC are absurd- even sans the caveat... My .02--- keep the change.

Well Thanks :-)

What the parent poster is forgetting here is the fact that TDS is on a network called, "Comedy Central." It in no way purports itself as a news station.

I don't care what it purports itself to be. I care what its impact on political discourse is. If Bill O'Reilly renamed his show to the "a lighthearted entertainment show with a moral-conservative reactionis

Re:

[thommoose]

You might have missed my point--- lemme try to put it a little more eloquently... Fact is, lamenting the sad state of affairs betwixt the media & body politic in on a forum like /. is either of two things: futile or redundant. Items like this meet with malaise or abject apathy probably 90% of the time. For the remainder, it's simply preaching to the choir, oh citizen... Seriously, a line needs to be drawn between media for entertainment's sake (The Onion, TDS, TV Guide)- and media as an information

Re:

[Brandybuck]

It in no way purports itself as a news station.

Too bad there are millions of people who actually do get their news from TDS. This is no different from the millions of people who get their news from talk radio, despite talk radio billing itself as commentary and not news.

People get their news from who best validates their world views. That the "reality based community" gets their news from Comedy Central is very revealing of their world view. That they think Stewart and Colbert are funny is every bit as fri

Re:

[Shag]

What the parent poster is forgetting here is the fact that TDS is on a network called, "Comedy Central." It in no way purports itself as a news station.

That's right... in the U.S. Outside the U.S., folks in some areas see The Daily Show on this other network, called "CNN International." Maybe you've heard of it?

(Yes, there is a little disclaimer message on black at the beginning of the show...)

Re:

[thommoose]

And these people that don't understand satire are the same the make Jerry Springer our top entertainment export.

Since they're owned by the same parent coporation (read: Turner) then I'm not surprised that CNN would want to snag CC's Stewart to include something intelligent...

http://edition.cnn.com/CNNI/Programs/daily.show/ [cnn.com]

To clarify for everyone else: Internationally it's still called, "The Daily Show"- just with "Global Edition" added- and it appears on our export version of CNN (aka CNNI)

Re:

[Vellmont]

I also think his sort of humor can be harmful to intelligent political discourse.

Sure, if your only view of the world is a comedic look at politics. But then too much of ANY viewpoint is harmful to intelligent political discourse. As someone else pointed out, TDS is on a network called "Comedy Central", so expecting them to be some pure news source is really missing the point. As far as young people only getting political news from TDS.. well I guess the alternative is for them to get no news at all and

Re:

[stuartrobinson]

It's a sad commentary on the state of the American news media that The Daily Show keeps being held to journalistic standards. Jon Stewart and the rest of the regulars on the show aren't journalists, nor do they claim to be. They're comedians. If the news coverage provided by the show compares favorably to CNN, MSNBC, or Fox, that doesn't say good things for the mainstream news outlets.

Re:

[CCW]

You can't be much of a TDS watcher if you haven't noticed that Stewart frequently has fairly right wing guests on that are uniformly warmly welcomed, treated with courtesy and allowed to speak. William Kristol from the Daily Standard, and John Ashcroft are two recent examples. That courtesy is a massive departure from other shows and a huge good example for the young audience.

The comedy comes from pointing out the absurdities in the news coverage - particularly in what they select as important enough to

Obvious joke.

[Lethyos]

Gee, I am surprised that every cloud did not contain the word “developers” in huge, bright-white type!

Re:

[$RANDOMLUSER]

And then there's all the years where "infermayshun" was every third word out of Gates' mouth.

Re:

[Basehart]

Bill uses the word Users a lot. Sounds like a drug lord. MSFT vs Apple become Crack vs Cocaine

A key to MS success is exposed here

[mattnuzum]

Even in their marketing material, "programmers" and related terms are often more prominent than "users." Bill & co realized early on that the way to get users is to get software that users want/need. They've been courting developers since the beginning and I've never seen (historically speaking - since I was born about the time Altair came out) that they deviated from that plan. Apple didn't start this model until OS X came out and even Linux is only just starting to lower the barrier to entry for developers of *desktop software*. (that's not entirely true, actually, but we in the Linux community have generally treated trolltech/QT like redheaded step children so if you don't count them the previous statement is passable)

That isn't a troll

[mattnuzum]

By the way, the above isn't a troll, I'm just lamenting that we in the Linux development world don't have a great portfolio of tools to attract developers from outside the world of computer science. Windows has Access, VB, Visual Studio, Borland Builder and etc.

Re:

[Gr8Apes]

Access is the worst POS to ever hit the streets... except for maybe VB. Why are these so bad? Because they by design encourage horrible development. Access by ignoring everything a DB should be and making regular business folks think they're as good as developers and then wondering why their personal system when opened to multiple users blows up and loses data, and VB because where else do you get built-in incompatibilities and virii for free?

I'd have to say it's a toss-up as there are few products that ev

Re:

[HappySqurriel]

Linux's problem isn't that they lack developers nearly as much as all development for linux is by developers for developers which produces really awful user interfaces.

Linux has tons of powerful applications that do amazing things, but you have to read a manual of highly technical gibberish in order to use the most basic of features; when I'm using linux as a multimedia PC I don't want to have to press ctrl-p to play and shift-alt-r to record, I want something that is simple and straight forward to use. Win

Re:

[blankaBrew]

GNUstep could be that amazing development environment for linux. It (NeXTSTEP) was designed to be the perfect environment for producing elegently powerful apps very rapidly with as little code as necessary. If this project was strongly adopted by the community, the number and quality of linux apps would increase.

Unfortunately, the project seems like its stuck in stasis.

Re:

[Nasarius]

Linux has tons of powerful applications that do amazing things, but you have to read a manual of highly technical gibberish in order to use the most basic of features; when I'm using linux as a multimedia PC I don't want to have to press ctrl-p to play and shift-alt-r to record, I want something that is simple and straight forward to use.

Have you actually...used Linux in the past five years? There are quite a few distros and applications that cater to your desires. I click on a video file in Konqueror, and

The word "users"

[JamesTKirk]

It's interesting that the word "users" features much more prominently in some of the earlier texts than it does in the later ones.

Re:

[ivoras]

Haven't you heard? It's no longer politically correct to call them "users". The lowest applicable designation right now is "geniuses"...

Open

[Caesar Tjalbo]

I could've known Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists" is in a closed format.

Re:

[solevita]

I would have read it, but I've been trained not to open Word documents from untrusted or unexpected sources, even though it's a Tuesday!

animalbabies?

[gEvil (beta)]

Anyone know the context in which the word "animalbabies" appears in the Bill Gates April 1987 Byte Magazine article?

Re:

[Rob T Firefly]

Maybe they asked him what he ate for breakfast.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Anyone know the context in which the word "animalbabies" appears in the Bill Gates April 1987 Byte Magazine article?

Didn't MS tinker around with singing fluff-doll toys around that time? If I remember correctly, they pulled the plug.
     

Re:

[luxdex]

Anyone know the context in which the word "animalbabies" appears in the Bill Gates April 1987 Byte Magazine article?

From Factiva's full text archive:

Figure 3: A Microsoft Excel macro program called AnimalBabies. AnimalBabies is a guessing game where the program displays an animal randomly selected from a table named ''animals'' and asks the user to guess what the offspring is called.

Interesting phrases appear

[truthsearch]

87: programmatic programmers propose protocol redesign
87: excel expertise fact fixing
87: foolish formulated graphical guiding
95: maintenance march messy
95: studying super tracking users
98: undermine unintentional unix users

Windows CeMeNT

[viking80]

Our shop is 100% Microsoft, including:
Windows Ce
Windows Me
Windows NT

Due to the flexibility, nimble, responsive solutions we have, we call this

Ce-me-nt

Re:

[forkazoo]

Our shop is 100% Microsoft, including:
Windows Ce
Windows Me
Windows NT

Due to the flexibility, nimble, responsive solutions we have, we call this

Ce-me-nt

Well, if You would just add Win95, Linux, BSD, and Sun with Open Firmware on the front end of that infrastructure, you could have

95 Lbs Of Cement

Re:

[WilliamSChips]

If you used Windows 2000 instead of 95 you would have a ton of cement.

Re:

[PPH]

So a system with 3 O/S partitions would have CeMeNt boots?

My favorite quote

[Anonymous Coward]

from TFA:

"Who were we imitating . . . When we did the Altair BASIC? . . . And who were we imitating when we did Microsoft Word? When we did Excel? It's just nonsense"

Bill, you must've been kidding. Those were exactly the same sort of imitiations that your company now accuses FOSS of and derides them for it.

Re:

[ch-chuck]

Who were we imitating..

Oh, DEC BASIC, Wordstar and Lotus 123.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

close, but no cigar

1) DARTMOUTH BASIC (an open source program!)
2) the IBM DisplayWriter
3) VisiCalc & SuperCalc

how soon we forget...

Where's the word security?

[millia]

I find the absence of the word 'security' very interesting. I wasn't expect to see a word like 'quality' of course.

Re:

[Chysn]

Yes, "plaintiff" makes the tag cloud more often than "security."

in the recent speeches...

[corerunner]

I'm intrigued by the prominence of "blah"... maybe Bill is borrowing George W's approach of deliberately dumbing down the audience

Re:

[Tablizer]

I'm intrigued by the prominence of "blah"... maybe Bill is borrowing George W's approach of deliberately dumbing down the audience

W's current approach is vague mamby pamby chearleading kinds of statements, like "We must move forward with determination or risk slipping backward."
       

Blah?

[zlogic]

Check out Ballmer's July 2004 speech: the dominant words are "innovation" and "blah" :-)

FOSS

[Bryansix]

What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?

If only Bill Gates knew.

If only M$ had that level of quality.

[Erris]

It's amazing how people can still fall for that line of reasoning. Witness this gem from Network world:

If you've never read Bill Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists," published in February, 1976, it's highly recommended as Gates goes off on the "majority of hobbyists" who are "stealing" their software. He was right, of course, but the language he uses sounds so incredibly whiney that you wonder how the man ever became Bill Gates.

As your single quote from Gate's infamous whine shows so well, Gates' fundament

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

As your single quote from Gate's infamous whine shows so well, Gates' fundamental operating principle was wrong and everything built off it is a lie.

I don't think his principle was wrong. I think it was true enough when he said it, but the Internet has changed the world. It is a rare hobbyist who can put in three years of full-time, uncompensated work on a project, but there are plenty of people who can and will put in 10-20 hours per week on a project. With the power of the Internet to enable their collaboration, a half-dozen part-time developers can easily exceed the output of a full-time developer.

Anyone who's used free software knows that the quality exceeds Mr. Gate's wished for 3 many years and the quality of most non free software projects.

I have to disagree here as well. I use F/LOSS

Typical Gates logic....

[jsimon12]

Keep saying something enough and it will become true. Gates just lies and lies in the Playboy interview:

What was the first microcomputer software company? Microsoft.

WRONG Digital Research was found the year before, it was also the company Microsoft stole DOS from....

And who were we imitating when we did Microsoft Word? When we did Excel?

WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3......

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And wasn't Altair BASIC derived from a pirated copy of Dartmouth BASIC, and developed on (then rather expensive) computer time "donated" by Harvard?

Re:

[Axello]

Actually, I think MS Word -the Windows version- resembled MacWrite more than it did WordPerfect.

Re:

[science_gone_bad]

"Actually, I think MS Word -the Windows version- resembled MacWrite more than it did WordPerfect."

That's because it was.....copied that is.

MS Word started on the PC (bought of course.. never developed in house), then was ported to the Mac. Then they took the UI stuff they learned there and ported them back to the Windows version. Then making sure that the feature set for the 2 versions was at least 1-2 years behind for the Mac versions.

Where do you think the Cut(Cmd-X) Copy (Cmd-C) and Paste (Cmd-V) came fr

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

In the playboy article he states that Word was so innovative. I believe WordPerfect was around for a while before Word ever came out...

Re:

[Inthewire]

Gary Kildall wrote CP/M in 1973 for the Intel 8080, one of Intel's first microprocessors. He then began writing various versions for popular (and unpopular) microprocessors. He soon tired of reimplementing common functionality, isolated those routines, and created a distinct BIOS for each new chip. Now he had a standard OS that could be ported to any appropriate chip with relatively little effort. Digital Research was formed to sell this product, which it licensed at $10 per copy to manufacturers.
During tha

I see a trend

[jbrader]

As you move the slider forward through time you start to see less "computer" words (like Altair, cassette, floppy etc) and more "business" words (agreement, indemnification, patented etc). That's very telling all by itself.

Is that lag? No, it's Microsoft

[svunt]

What I noticed most strikingly was that words start popping up from MS about two or three years after the rest of us have been using them. 'Internet' 'linux' and many others made me think the picture was lagging behind my mouse-dragging, but it was just MS being part of the uncool crowd,who only get to hear about shit after it's already out of fashion.

A lack of Progress?

[Mystic Silverfox]

Not that should surprise any of us here, but I found somewhat humorous anyway. In the time line, for November 1984 is an ad for MS Word. While praising "Spell"'s ability to have custom words added to a dictionary they used the words cryptococcosis and aepyornis as examples of technical terms that could be added. Interestingly enough, 20+ years later, they're both still "addable". If a company was aware of these words over 20 years ago why not add them to the built-in dictionary somewhere along the way?

Re:

[theurge14]

Blame marketing.

Re:

[kabz]

If a company was aware of these words over 20 years ago why not add them to the built-in dictionary somewhere along the way?

640 words should be enough for anyone.

Thanks, I'll get my coat.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Because if you add one medical word, you have to add bunches and bunches, bloating up the spelling dictionary. It would make more sense to sell medical terms separately.
       

USERS has no respect.

[recharged95]

I love it how the word USER got a lot of respect before 1980 (DOS release), then near the OS2 release (1987), then near the windows 95 release (1995) and now near the Vista release (2007). Otherwise, the USER wasn't that much important.

So it looks like users will be forgotten soon after this month and until Vienna comes out.

What wasn't said

[Rick Genter]

I scanned through the timeline -- granted rather quickly -- but what I found interesting were some of the words that didn't appear in any of Gates' or Ballmer's documents: secure or security.

I think some people believe that if you deny a problem exists it will "just go away."