It was 1989, and I was obsessed with the Mac. Apple's portable, 9-inch-screen computer was an exciting graphical leap, and I wanted to use it for everything. But I wasn't using it. Instead, I, like ...

On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in ...

Raymond Chen recently shared another interesting tidbit about the inner workings of Windows 95. The original 32-bit consumer operating system had a "secret" fast-restart feature, which ...

In the annals of PC history, IBM’s OS/2 represents a road not taken. Developed in the waning days of IBM’s partnership with Microsoft—the same partnership that had given us a decade or so of MS-DOS ...

TL;DR: Microsoft will likely never release the original source code of Windows into the wild, but the company is clearly interested in sharing important episodes of its software development history.

Reader Steve P. sends in this question: “I’m running Windows 2000 and want to upgrade my system BIOS. The instructions say to create a bootable disk with the format a:/s command. However, the /s doesn ...

On November 20th, 1985, a then not-so-big company called Microsoft announced that Windows was commercially available. Read the full story of the Microsoft operating system below. Windows 1 to 11: The ...

It's no joke. Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License. Why? Well, why not? That got Hanselman and Wilcox digging into the ...