1.
Microsoft
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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.
Microsoft Access
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Microsoft Access is a database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of applications, included in the Professional, Microsoft Access stores data in its own format based on the Access Jet Database Engine. It can also import or link directly to data stored in other applications, software developers, data architects and power users can use Microsoft Access to develop application software. Visual objects used in forms and reports expose their methods and properties in the VBA programming environment, Microsofts first attempt to sell a relational database product was during the mid 1980s, when Microsoft obtained the license to sell R, Base. In the late 1980s Microsoft developed its own solution codenamed Omega and it was confirmed in 1988 that a database product for Windows and OS/2 was in development. Omega was also expected to provide a front end to the Microsoft SQL Server, the application was very resource-hungry, and there were reports that it was working slowly on the 386 processors that were available at the time. It was scheduled to be released in the 1st quarter of 1990, parts of the project were later used for other Microsoft projects, Cirrus and Thunder. After Accesss premiere, the Omega project was demonstrated in 1992 to several journalists, after the Omega project was scrapped, some of its developers were assigned to the Cirrus project. Its goal was to create a competitor for applications like Paradox or dBase that would work on Windows, after Microsoft acquired FoxPro, there were rumors that the Microsoft project might get replaced with it, but the company decided to develop them in parallel. It was assumed that the project would use of Extensible Storage Engine but, in the end. The project used some of the code from both the Omega project and a version of Visual Basic. In July 1992, betas of Cirrus shipped to developers and the name Access became the name of the product. The product shipped on seven 1.44 MB diskettes, the manual shows a 1994 copyright date. Originally, the software worked well with relatively small databases but testing showed that some circumstances caused data corruption. With Office 95, Microsoft Access 7.0 became part of the Microsoft Office Professional Suite, joining Microsoft Excel, Word, since then, Microsoft has released new versions of Microsoft Access with each release of Microsoft Office. This includes Access 97, Access 2000, Access 2002, Access 2003, Access 2007, Access 2010, and Access 2013. Versions 3.0 and 3.5 of Microsoft Jet database engine had an issue which made these versions of Access unusable on a computer with more than 1 GB of memory. While Microsoft fixed this problem for Jet 3. 5/Access 97 post-release, the native Access database format has also evolved over the years
