Interesting facts about Microsoft

As the world knows it,Microsoft is the largest software organization on the planet and  also the organization of the richest man Bill Gates.Over the years Microsoft has experienced a lot of good times and a few bad ones. I have tried to outline some interesting facts and events here and i hope its fun to read and look back into the history of Microsoft. Here it goes:

1. Nobody can create a folder named “Con”.

Try to create anywhere on your hard disk a folder called “Con” (without the quotes). Go to a location on your hard disk, right click, choose “New” and then select “Folder” from the menu that appears. Name the folder “Con” (without quotes) and hit Enter. You’ll see that the folder won’t be named “Con“. It will be “New folder”

This is because:

In windows the folder name and the special system variables share the same interface, so when you create a folder with a system variable name it will consider that folder already exist!!

these special system variables are available irrespective of path

You cannot create a folder with these names also:

CON, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3,COM1 to COM9 and LPT1 to LPT9....

CON means console, COM1 means serial port 1, LPT1 means parallel port 1

2. A text file made with Notepad, with the following content : “Bush hid the facts” (without quotes) won’t display the actual text.

Go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad . Write in Notepad the following text : “Bush hid the facts” (without quotes) then Save the file and exit Notepad. Now go to the text file you created and open it. You’ll see that the text you just wrote and save won’t show. 

3. Write in Word this : “=rand(200,99)” (without the quotes) and witness the magic.

Open Microsoft Word and on the first line write : “=rand(200,99)” (without the quotes)  and hit Enter. Magic in the making.

Some More Interesting Facts About Microsoft

1.Founders of microsoft,Bill gates and Paul Allen were teen hackers and they once hacked a seattle security system.

2.The first company founded by Gates and Allen was Traff-O-Data and it analyzed data traffic

3.In 1977 Bill Gates was arrested in mexico for running a red light and driving without a drivers licence

4.Bill Gates told Forbes that he didn't just drop out of Harvard,he sed he went on to find Microsoft.

5.Microsoft was founded in new Mexico in 1975,it moved to Bellevue in 1979 and settled in Redmond in 1986

6.Microsoft was initilally Micro-soft.The hyphen was removed in 1976, thus Microsoft.

7.Steve Ballmer, the now member of the board of the directors of Microsoft,finished Harvard, dropped out of his graduate program in Stanford and went on to join Microsoft as the 24th employee.

8.First customer of Microsoft, Micro Telemetry and Instrumentation System bought Altair Basic,a program written by Gates and Allen while Gateswas in college.

9.The total revenue pulled by microsoft in its first year was only $16000.Four years later it was pulling in an annual revenue of 1 million.

10.Microsoft bought a program called QDOS(Quick and Dirty operating system) in 1981 for $50000 and renamed it as MS-DOS.Then it was licensed to IBM as a software for the first IBM PC.



11.Gates once claimed that microsoft would never sell a 32 bit operating system. But the most popular windows 7 is a 64 bit operating system.

12.Vista's delayed delivery was nothing new. Windows 1.0 launched in 1985 was delayed by 2 years.  

13.At least two other graphical user interfaces from VSIsoft and digital research INC beat windows to the market.

14.3Before the marketing people got hold of it,Microsoft was going to be called Interface Manager.

15.Winver 1.4,the first virus to affect Microsoft was unleashed in 1992.

16.Microsoft has been manufacturing hardware since 1983, when it introduced the Microsoft mouse 1.0.

17.Apple tried to sue Microsoft in 1985 and 1988 out of existence for stealing drop down menus,tiled windows and mouse devices.

18.Part of Microsoft's winning defense: many of its ideas were developed by XEROX and predated the MAc

19.In 2004 windows Guru Jim Allchin wrote "We lost our way" in developing what would eventually become Vista

20.Allchin also wrote "I would buy a Mac if i was not working at Microsoft"

21.Microsoft launched its first website in 1993 for support services previously available on a CompuServe forum

22.Paul Allen retired from Microsoft in 1983 as a result of his battle with hodgkins disease.

23.Through his company Vulcan Inc Paul Allen has invested heavily in technology research,philantrophy and even the search for extra terrestrial life

24.Allen owns the NBA's Portland trailBlazers,the NFL's Seattle Seahawks and the Seattle Sounders FC professional soccer  franchise

25.Microsoft's stock went public at $21 per share in 1986.Dividents have been paid since 2003.

26.Bill Gates became a Billionaire at the age of 31,just a year after the IPO

27.Microsoft's stock has split a total of nine times since its stock went public in 1986.

28.In 1999 Bill Gates became the first American with 100 billion in assets.

29.Steve Ballmer was the first ever person who was not a company founder to become a billionaire off of stock options

30.In April 2009 Microsoft reported its first loss in 23 years.

31.Douglas Coupland's novel Microserfs,documents tech culture in the pre web days.

32.Microsoft has acquired over 150 companies in its 34 year history

33.Microsoft's first acquisition was forethought, the company that designed what would later become "The Powerpoint" in 1987.

34.Microsoft's largest acquisition was in 2007 when it snatched up the digital marketing firm aQuantive for $6.3 billion.

35.Microsoft's headcount has nearly tripled since 1999.

36.Microsoft's workforce is little over 75% male.

37.Full timers have called temps "dash trash" for the dash that precedes the name in their assigned Microsoft email address

38.Microsoft's policy of hiring "permatemps" shaped IRS policy;in 1996,payroll taxes were increased for longtime temps.

39.Microsofts real state portfolio totals over 14 million square feet most of it in the Puget Sound Area.

40.Bill Gates is a knight(sans shining armor).The queen of England bestowed him with an honorary knighthood in 2005.

41.Started in 1991 Microsoft Research has grown to employ 850 researchers with 850 researchers,with 55 areas of study and its  labs worldwide.

42.Microsofts accessible technology group makes computers easier to use for people with disabillities.

43.Microsoft's legal department is currently defending more than 50 patent infringements cases-10 to go to trial next year

44.Microsoft spends almost half of its legal budget on patent cases, this year it announced its 10000th patent

45.The dollar 2.8 billion in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation last year totalled the GDP of more than 25 countries worldwide.

46.The US-based company Microsoft has become one of the world's top companies and the uncontested global leader in software due  to its two star products: the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office.

47.Microsoft has long been considered a champion of innovation since it was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates, who left the company  this year in June.

48.The software major currently faces steep competition from Internet giant Google which has mounted a massive challenge to

49.Microsoft's dominance by launching a series of free Internet software products last year.

50.Microsoft was created on April 4, 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Its headquarters are located in Redmond, Washington in  the northwestern United States. The company has locations in 104 countries and employs 80,000 people, 60 percent of whom work   in the United States.

51.Microsoft's Windows runs on more than 90 per cent of the world's personal computers, which means it is used on nearly a  billion machines worldwide. Microsoft Office, which includes applications such as Word and Excel, also has captured around 90 per cent of the office software market.

52.Microsoft has regularly faced antitrust accusations, and was forced to pay a record fine of 497 million euros by the European.

53.Commission, which imposed the fine in March 2004 and saw it upheld in September 2007.

54.Products Microsoft has developed include portals and search engines on MSN Internet, in television with the MSNBC news  channel and website, the online edition of the encyclopedia Encarta and in products such as the Microsoft mouse, the personal   music player Zune and the Xbox game console, one of the highest selling in the world.

55.With shares being traded since March 13, 1986, Microsoft has the third highest stock market capitalisation in the United  States with 270 billion dollars, far ahead of its rivals Google, IBM and Apple.

56.Microsoft posted 51.12 billion dollars in sales for the fiscal year 2006-2007 and net profits of 14.07 billion dollars and  aims to sell 60 billion dollars worth of goods in the present cycle.