I get the Gates Notes email periodically and I always find it interesting to read. Like Bill Gates or not, he is a very smart individual and has thoughtful things to say. Even when I don’t always agree with him, I enjoy hearing his view and have enjoyed seeing him deliver presentations. In fact, one of my career highlights was at SQL Saturday #175 – Fargo, held at the MS campus. Bill Gates was speaking to employees that day and we were allowed to watch the Q&A from the balcony. Later, I saw him start to leave and stop by a sign. He asked someone about SQL Saturday. When they explained the idea for free conferences, he said “that’s cool.”

One of the recent emails talked about the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, with the original source code available for a BASIC interpreter. It’s an interesting read to me, since I learned BASIC first (and a little assembler) on an Apple II and a TRS-80. I didn’t start a company, but I certainly appreciate the excitement of tackling a programming challenge back then when memory and disk were in short supply. Most of my early programming tasks had me worried about how much memory and disk I was using, trying desperately to minimize both.

My first real exposure to Microsoft technology came after college, while working at a power utility. We had DOS desktops and were just starting to look at Windows 3.1. Until that point, I’d mostly lived in the Apple II space and then the mainframe/Unix space. I coveted a SparcStation with SunOS and had to settle for a PC architecture because my newly graduated budget wouldn’t support anything from SUN.

I adapted to DOS and grew to enjoy the challenges of early Windows. I adopted Win95, learned SQL Server (OS/2 and Windows NT) and the rest is history for me. I’ve been using Microsoft technologies for 33 years now, and I’ve enjoyed the time using those tools. I also appreciate the great career that Microsoft gave me.

Looking back at the times I had to work with autoexec.bat and config.sys files, when I used the probe account in early SQL Servers to check configurations, learning to track and read disk configurations for SQL Server 6.5 restores, moving from Windows NT 3.1 to 4.0 to the more modern architectures of Windows 2000 and beyond. Watching the “Visual” series of development tools and the Win32 API evolve into the .NET namespaces and the introduction of PowerShell to give us an easier way of working with non-compiled scripts. These are fun memories for me to look back on.

Most of you reading this likely use some sort of Microsoft technology. What good (or bad) memories do you have?

Steve Jones

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