Microsoft is celebrating 50 years of existence in April, and whether you like it or not, this organization changed the lives of generations of us with its products and services. It’s synonymous with Windows and computing in general. I went through its tumultuous history to find the products that defined my experience with Microsoft throughout time.

5 MS-DOS

And there was…darkness

For younger readers, this was before the operating systems even had a graphical user interface, back in the 80s. MS-DOS was an acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, and if you’ve ever opened Command Prompt, that’s the closest representation of how the OS worked.

You inserted a floppy disk (a 5.25-inch one at first) with MS-DOS in the dedicated drive and the system would boot up showing a prompt. Then, you could write commands to load other software. From the MS-DOS 2.0, the system supported 10 MB, 16 MB, and 32 MB hard drives, and you could run the OS from there.

Actually, the OS was not created by Microsoft, but by Tim Paterson, an engineer working for Seattle Computer Products at that time. In 1981, Microsoft hired Peterson and bought the OS, which was called 86-DOS, for $50,000.

Microsoft needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, and for a while, they worked with IBM, which ran PC-DOS, a version of the operating system Microsoft licensed to the company.

Even though Microsoft released the first operating systems with graphical interfaces, they ran on MS-DOS. For instance, to launch Windows up to the 3.11 version, you had to boot MS-DOS and type windows.exe in the prompt to launch Windows.

Starting with Windows 95, MS-DOS was demoted to just a bootloader. However, when Windows 3.0, the first graphical interface OS was launched in 1990, the majority of users started to forget about MS-DOS. I used the word darkness in the subtitle because the MS-DOS interface was black and white, but for many of us, it was the start of everything if you played your cards right.

4 Windows 95

The system we used to love

Windows 95 was arguably the most impactful product in Microsoft’s history. It was a huge step up from Windows 3.11 in terms of graphics and features, and it introduced Internet Explorer, at least in the OEM Service Release 1. Back then, Internet Explorer was available as a stand-alone software, competing with Netscape Navigator and Mosaic browsers.

Getting back to Windows 95, you needed an Intel 386DS CPU, 4 MB of RAM, and over 50 MB of hard drive space to run it optimally. I remember that I managed to run it on my 386SX system with 4 MB of RAM, and it worked fine, but it was flying on my friend’s 486DX system.

Windows 95 added the Start menu for the first time, improved the 32-bit application stability, and that starting sound of the OS was mesmerizing! With Windows 95 also came the concept of a taskbar. The running applications showed down there, and you could just click on them to change from one to another: multitasking!

The OS also had more keyboard shortcuts and file shortcuts, and if you didn’t like something, you could just throw it into the Trash bin. Yeah, it was not yet a Recycle bin. There were not so many apps included with Windows 95, but you had the basic ones, such as Calculator, Paint, and Notepad. However, the cherry on top was Windows Media Player.

3 Microsoft Office

All the tools you need for a desk job

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were released in the 80s, but in October 1990, Microsoft bundled them into Microsoft Office for Windows. The suite contained Word 1.1, Excel 2.0, and PowerPoint 2.0, and it was designed to work on Windows 3.0. Back then, it wasn’t appealing to me, because I was a kid interested in games like Doom, Dune 2, or the keyboard-destroying Mortal Kombat (4 3.5 floppy disks!).

Getting back to Office, my first encounter was with Microsoft Office 95, released in 1995. As you would imagine, the suite was created as a 32-bit application to match Windows 95. It was the first time when Office was introduced in Standard and Professional versions. The Professional version has Access 7.0 as a bonus, besides Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Schedule+.

The interface was a lot more appealing and had a button for anything. It was a bit intimidating, but once you clicked around, you would discover that you could do amazing things with text formatting and fonts.

However, the most impactful version of the suite was Microsoft Office 97 which introduced overwhelming improvements. For instance, it brought the first command bars, which were not only a lot easier to use, but they also looked great.

By far the best improvement was grammar checking, but it also introduced Clippit, or Clippy, as we all know it. At first, the animated assistant was funny, and it provided some helpful tips along the way. However, after a few weeks with the Office suite, the first thing I did when opening Word was to close it. That’s because it became predictable, repetitive with its tips, and was generally an annoyance.

Microsoft Office is still around today, it evolved to become what we now have to call Microsoft 365 Copilot, and will remain a landmark for the software giant.

2 DirectX

Synonymous with gaming

Without DirectX, we wouldn’t have advanced graphics gaming. This statement should be enough to close this chapter, but let’s dive in a bit into its history. The first DirectX was released under the Windows Game SDK suite in 1995, and it was developed by Craig Eisler. You can read the story of how he did all that on an archived version of his blog.

However, at first, the developers were not so enthusiastic about it. To make DirectX more popular, Microsoft made a deal with John Carmack, the creator of Doom. Doom and Doom 2 were already running on MS-DOS, but Microsoft proposed porting the games to DirectX to run on Windows 95. That’s how Doom 95 became the first DirectX game.

Later on, Microsoft used DirectX as the basis for the main API of the first Microsoft Xbox gaming consoles. Nvidia helped Microsoft with the API development and the graphics hardware. However, I think that DirectX really kicked off in 2002 with the release of DirectX 9, which included support for elaborate shader software like the pixel and vertex shader 2.0. Fast forwarding to today, DirectX 12 and DirectX 12 Ultimate are still the main pillars of gaming development.

1 Microsoft Azure

The home of cloud computing

Microsoft Azure and the rest of the cloud services and components are now one of the main revenue drivers for the Redmond giant. That should say a lot about the impact of this platform. It has everything, from application development to software as a service, management, frameworks, and systems that are hard to contain in this article (it offers over 600 services!).The most important fact is that it has become one of the leading cloud platforms for companies and governments all over the globe.

The first Azure iteration was presented at the Professional Developers Conference in 2008, and it had a shady codename: Project Red Dog. At first, it was named Windows Azure, but the software giant changed its name to Microsoft Azure in 2014. However, the plans for Azure started a lot sooner, with the Microsoft acquisition of Groove Network in 2005.

It’s hard to determine the exact moment when Microsoft Azure became a stronghold for cloud computing. Arguably, it was in 2014, when Microsoft previewed the Azure machine learning capabilities. That was a landmark commitment for Microsoft to evolve and include breakthrough automation technologies into its cloud services.

According to the latest Statista report, in the third quarter of 2024, Microsoft Azure and connected services had 20% of the market, a step below the 31% held by Amazon Web Services.

What is the Microsoft landmark product for you?

It is hard to create a list of only 5 impactful Microsoft products or services because we have seen a lot of them in its 50 years of existence. For you, it might have been Windows XP, Solitaire, WordPad, Windows Live, Microsoft Copilot (well, maybe not that), or others that I didn’t think about including. My goal with this article was to celebrate a period of our existence and to provide a look back on some of the products that were meaningful in Microsoft’s past and present.