Tomorrow (for you Europeans that is today), it’s the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC. Some people and companies may celebrate that event, but for some kind of reason, I was silently hoping that IBM would be leading the pack. They’re not, of course. After all, that’s why they’re called ‘Big Blue’.
You know you’re a nerd, when you manage to find that Internet article that shows which companies Microsoft bought since 1983. After all, Microsoft, that innovative beacon of software development, had to start making its products out of something, right? Visual Basic, PowerPoint, Frontpage and others were indeed existing products that were slowly merged and branded into Microsoft products.
Shortly after SourceSafe’s release, Microsoft pre-announced a similar application called Microsoft Delta, which failed to sell. Microsoft then purchased OneTree and renamed SourceSafe as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe.
I do remember this thing called ‘Delta’, and as a matter of fact, I also remember Cooper Software, Vermeer Technologies and Spyglass. Do you?
This doesn’t mean that I despise Microsoft: I think many people would agree that thanks to Microsoft there wouldn’t have been a computer industry. Sometimes for better, and sometimes worse.