DOS

He's a past engineer from Microsoft.

He worked for him back in the Windows 95 DOS days.

And he just did an episode on this that deep dives into it.

If you want to get some more stuff where he took Microsoft Calculator, used AI to look at the software, no source code or anything like that.

While Alan doesn't bristle with intellectual energy, he says he left Microsoft because, at the time, he was stuck working on the next versions of unchallenging Microsoft programs.

Blame me for having to type the backslash in DOS, he jokes.

Microsoft didn't have a true R&D department at the time.

Headed by David Liddell, who was aggressively recruited for the job, Interval's mission is to be self-funding in 10 years, supporting itself from the licensing fees its inventions generate.

Street myths about Paul Allen Visionary.

In a small way, he did have the original technical ideas behind the early Microsoft.

And DOS, the Microsoft product that has made the company's fortune, was purchased from outside Microsoft.

Its business brilliance lay in how it was marketed to IBM and beyond.

And plugged it in, started playing around with it right away.

It was sort of the I don't know if you've ever used an Apple Mac 2C, but it was the first graphical user interface computer before Windows actually came out, right? Because Microsoft was still on DOS, text-based, right? So pretty easy to navigate with a mouse and clicking things and just figuring stuff out.

Literally figuring stuff out.

I spent my time on the computer just figuring out how everything works, what a notepad did and what this did.

It's just a reflection of the tools that they have been handed and what they know.

And they've really gone in a different direction than some of the folks who've been through DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10.

You get the idea.

And of course, some of the folks along the way, older users, they've felt embarrassed about losing skills they once had, even though the world has changed around us.

Again, ComputerTalkRadio.com.

So Doug's question in regards to Microsoft and not listening to us down here at the bottom of the barrel is something that is a slow evolution in my mind of where Microsoft has been and where it's going.

I've been watching Microsoft since the days of DOS, very early versions of DOS, no less.

And it is really hard to miss the shift in who they're listening to and what they're doing and all of the different directions they've expanded in.