50 Years of Microsoft: From Longhorn to the Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, Surface Studio, and Recycle Bin — An Insider View of Micro-Soft

Microsoft celebrates its 50-year anniversary today at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The software maker will unveil new Copilot features, and we’re expecting to see familiar faces from the past and present of Microsoft to reflect on the company’s 50 years and the future of this tech giant.

Microsoft’s next 50 years look increasingly focused on an AI transformation it’s in the middle of building toward. It has the potential to overhaul Windows, Office, Azure, and practically every business that Microsoft has built over the decades.

The Windows 10 launch period also set the stage for a whirlwind of trips and launches, including a trio of new Surface devices in the form of the Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, and Surface Studio. I was surprised to see the Surface Book.

Microsoft’s success with Windows and Office has allowed the company to expand in many directions over the past 50 years, including the launch of the Xbox game console in 2001, the Azure cloud push in 2008, and even the Bing search engine launch in 2009.

The early version of Windows was more capable than the current version with the launch of Windows 95. The highly-anticipated version of Windows launched at midnight, with fans lining up at stores to get boxed copies of Windows 95 to install on their PCs. Windows 95 introduced many parts of Windows that we still use today, including the familiar desktop, File Explorer, My Documents area, and Recycle Bin.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Micro-Soft fifty years ago. Microsoft originally focused on the development of software for the early personal computer Altair 8800, which was created by Gates and Allen.

During the development of Windows Vista, codenamed Longhorn, I regularly broke stories about the troubled evolution of this operating system and the many leaks about its features. Microsoft employees were quick to give me information about what the company was doing and I was able to read some of the unfinished builds. Microsoft sent its lawyers to try to shut me down after it was discovered that I was getting daily builds of Windows. When I was an investment bank employee, I had to tell my boss at the bank that Microsoft might want access to the company machines to make sure Longhorn was not left behind. He thought it was a joke and I was worried.

I built my own PCs and used them to run prerelease versions of Windows when I was a teenager. I wanted to impress my friends with a new Windows feature they hadn’t seen before, so I would DJ the latest mp3s I had got from the cloud service Napster.

While Windows rarely impressed my friends, my passion for unreleased Microsoft software really kicked up a gear with Windows XP. There was a lot to play with and a big departure from the Windows 2000 and Windows ME environments.

There was a lot of information hidden in the daily builds that Microsoft’s Windows engineers were working on. I wanted to get access to as many of these as possible, so I started to download and install leaked builds of Windows XP. My curiosity in how Windows was being developed led me to join internet forums like Neowin, where many of Microsoft’s leaks were being discussed.

Microsoft took the Neowin website offline in 2003 after a forum poster leaked a software development kit. CNET covered the story at the time, and the backlash certainly forced Microsoft to be a little more understanding of the emergence of online communities and overly enthusiastic bloggers like me.

Despite legal scare, I continued with myBlogging as a hobby and broke a story that was big enough to get attention from the Beeb. I walked into work the next day and everyone, who had watched my early morning appearance on BBC Breakfast, cheered and clapped like I was some kind of rockstar for discovering thousands of Hotmail passwords had been posted online.

Windows 10 Live Blog Solo: Covering The Verge with Windows Teams and the Windows XBOX Series S/X consoles at Mobile World Congress

I returned to Barcelona a few months later for the Mobile World Congress. One of the highlights of this particular show was the Windows 8 consumer preview. In recent months I was blacklisted from getting early access to the Windows 8 preview because I was too aggressive with the Windows team, but I wouldn’t let that derail my career at The Verge.

I sat in my hotel room and shot an iPad versus Windows 8 video, which somehow managed to get more than a million views despite being filmed on the ugliest carpet known to man.

The coverage of my Windows Phone and Windows stories caught the attention of The Verge, a publication that I had competed with over the years for Microsoft stories. I left the corporate IT world in late 2011 to make a big bet on my career dream by joining The Verge just a couple of months after the site was founded.

The excitement around Windows 8 quickly faded, though. The new Start menu, the full-screen apps, and the lack of a Start button made Windows fans unhappy. Microsoft tried to fix things with Windows 8.1 but they weren’t fixed until Windows 10.

I covered the Windows 10 announcement live blog solo. Microsoft did not broadcast the event so I had to shoot photos and live write about features almost simultaneously. It was stressful, but my years of covering the company as a side job meant I could pull it off.

At the same time, Microsoft unveiled Windows 10. I was blown away when I first tried this headset, as it provided the ability to see the world in augmented reality and use video calls with people in front of me.

Then the covid-19 pandemic happened. Microsoft used to want to make dual-screen computing a reality for everyone, now they want to have everyone work from home. The focus was quickly shifted to Microsoft Teams and the launch of the XBOX Series S / X consoles. I couldn’t travel for events, so Microsoft shipped me the xbox series X months before it was released. I had a lot of time to review an important product, which was a memorable moment.

Next week you can check back in to see if Bill Gates jumps over a chair to celebrate 50 years or if Steve Ballmer runs onstage and screams “developers” at the audience.

Drop a comment here or send me a message at [email protected] if you want to discuss anything else, as I always want to hear from readers. If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s secret projects, you can reach me via email at [email protected] or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there. Thanks for following Notepad.