1.
Microsoft
–
Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup, as of 2016, it was the worlds largest software maker by revenue, and one of the worlds most valuable companies. Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4,1975, to develop and it rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The companys 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion, in June 2012, Microsoft entered the personal computer production market for the first time, with the launch of the Microsoft Surface, a line of tablet computers. The word Microsoft is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion for computer programming, sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which offered a computer that tracked and analyzed automobile traffic data. Allen went on to pursue a degree in science at Washington State University. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systemss Altair 8800 microcomputer, Allen suggested that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device, after a call from Gates claiming to have a working interpreter, MITS requested a demonstration. Since they didnt actually have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter and they officially established Microsoft on April 4,1975, with Gates as the CEO. Allen came up with the name of Micro-Soft, as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In August 1977 the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office, the company moved to a new home in Bellevue, Washington in January 1979. Microsoft entered the OS business in 1980 with its own version of Unix, however, it was MS-DOS that solidified the companys dominance. For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, branding it as MS-DOS, following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981, Microsoft retained ownership of MS-DOS. Since IBM copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, other companies had to engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles. Due to various factors, such as MS-DOSs available software selection, the company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as with a publishing division named Microsoft Press. Paul Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after developing Hodgkins disease, while jointly developing a new OS with IBM in 1984, OS/2, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows, a graphical extension for MS-DOS, on November 20,1985. Once Microsoft informed IBM of NT, the OS/2 partnership deteriorated, in 1990, Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office
2.
DirectX
–
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, the name DirectX was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console, the X was used as the basis of the name Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. Direct3D is widely used in the development of games for Microsoft Windows. Direct3D is also used by software applications for visualization and graphics tasks such as CAD/CAM engineering. As Direct3D is the most widely publicized component of DirectX, it is common to see the names DirectX, the DirectX software development kit consists of runtime libraries in redistributable binary form, along with accompanying documentation and headers for use in coding. Originally, the runtimes were only installed by games or explicitly by the user, Windows 95 did not launch with DirectX, but DirectX was included with Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2. Windows 98 and Windows NT4.0 both shipped with DirectX, as has every version of Windows released since, the SDK is available as a free download. While the runtimes are proprietary, closed-source software, source code is provided for most of the SDK samples, starting with the release of Windows 8 Developer Preview, DirectX SDK has been integrated into Windows SDK. In late 1994, Microsoft was ready to release Windows 95, an important factor in the value consumers would place on it was the programs that would be able to run on it. Three Microsoft employees—Craig Eisler, Alex St and this was compounded by negative reception surrounding the Windows port of The Lion King. Microsoft needed a solution for programmers, the operating system was only months away from being released. Eisler, St. John, and Engstrom worked together to fix this problem, the first version of DirectX was released in September 1995 as the Windows Games SDK. It was the Win32 replacement for the DCI and WinG APIs for Windows 3.1, DirectX allowed all versions of Microsoft Windows, starting with Windows 95, to incorporate high-performance multimedia. Eisler wrote about the frenzy to build DirectX1 through 5 in his blog, DirectX2.0 became a component of Windows itself with the releases of Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT4.0 in mid-1996. It was at this event that Microsoft first introduced Direct3D and DirectPlay, the DirectX team faced the challenging task of testing each DirectX release against an array of computer hardware and software. A variety of different graphics cards, audio cards, motherboards, CPUs, input devices, games, the DirectX team also built and distributed tests that allowed the hardware industry to confirm that new hardware designs and driver releases would be compatible with DirectX. Prior to DirectX, Microsoft had included OpenGL on their Windows NT platform, at the time, OpenGL required high-end hardware and was focused on engineering and CAD uses
3.
Software versioning
–
Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique version names or unique version numbers to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category, these numbers are assigned in increasing order. At a fine-grained level, revision control is used for keeping track of incrementally different versions of electronic information. A variety of version numbering schemes have been created to track of different versions of a piece of software. The ubiquity of computers has led to these schemes being used in contexts outside computing. In sequence-based software versioning schemes, each release is assigned a unique identifier that consists of one or more sequences of numbers or letters. This practice permits users to evaluate how much real-world testing a given software release has undergone. This approach commonly permits the level of numbering, but does not apply this level of rigor to changes in that number,1.3.1,1.3.2,1.3.3,1.3.4. A typical product might use the numbers 0.9,0.9.1,0.9.2,0.9.3,1.0,1.0.1,1.0.2,1.1,1.1.1,2.0,2.0.1,2.0.2,2.1,2.1.1,2.1.2,2.2, etc.1 to 5.5, or Adobe Photoshop 5 to 5.5. This may be done to emphasize the value of the upgrade to the user, or, as in Adobes case. A different approach is to use the major and minor numbers, along with an alphanumeric string denoting the type, e. g. alpha. A software release train using this approach might look like 0.5,0.6,0.7,0.8,0.9 ==1. 0b1,1. 0b2,1. 0b3 ==1. 0rc1 ==1.0. If 1. 0rc1 turns out to have bugs which must be fixed, it turns into 1. 0rc2, if you do, you must roll out another release at that lower level. Other schemes impart meaning on individual sequences, major. minor or major, shared libraries in Solaris and Linux may use the current. revision. age format where current, The most recent interface number that the library implements. Revision, The implementation number of the current interface, age, The difference between the newest and oldest interfaces that the library implements. A similar problem of relative change significance and versioning nomenclature exists in book publishing, in most proprietary software, the first released version of a software product has version 1. Some projects use the version number to indicate incompatible releases. Two examples are Apache APR and the FarCry CMS, Semantic Versioning is a formal convention for specifying compatibility using a three-part version number, major version, minor version, and patch
