Editor's Note
It's Only the Beginning
Joshua Trupin
As we were packing up at Tech•Ed this June, we received the startling news that Bill Gates was stepping down from his role at Microsoft. Bill had a lot to do with the founding of our magazine. In fact, Microsoft Systems Journal (our predecessor) was started in 1986 based on his idea to reach Windows early adopters through a new print magazine. Years later, we are still going strong.
Of course, there are a lot more developers out there now. MSJ started by covering Windows 1.0 in its first issue. When Windows 2.1 was the top-of-the-line offering, only about 40,000 developers had purchased the Windows SDK. In 2006, we have almost 10 times that many people reading each issue in print (and a whole lot more readers online as well).
So what has spawned the massive growth of the computer industry in general, and Windows programming specifically? Cheaper hardware helped, of course. What used to be an $8,000 laptop can now be purchased for well under $1,000—and the functionality is orders of magnitude better. From our point of view, however, two major product releases really drove the PC industry to where it is today: Windows 3.0 and Visual Basic 1.0.
Windows 3.0 was the first version of Windows that really looked good. Before its release, the API documentation was essentially desktop published and pushed out in binders. Windows 3.0 had a crisp user interface and was also easier to program to. In the months after its release, you could see its rapid adoption as BBSs quickly filled up with Windows-targeted utilities, where previously they had been primarily MS-DOS boards. (If you don't know what a BBS was, have your dad explain.)
Even as Windows 3.0 was accelerating its adoption, Visual Basic brought thousands of new programmers into the world of GUI, making year-long projects into week-long endeavors. Programming started to become more about the ideas than the ability to remember whether you wanted the tiny or the large memory model.
Fast forward a few years, and we have a robust industry that learns from the past. The millions of programmers out there, whether they use Visual Basic, C#, C++, or some other language, expect to be able to get their ideas into code much more quickly than they could a decade ago. That's why design patterns have become so popular. In some ways, they are to program design what Visual Basic was to coding: a way to take a huge step over the initial costs of entry without sacrificing quality. (Sure, a lot of early Visual Basic programs were graced with bright red window backgrounds just because you could do it, but that's an issue for another Editor's Note.)
Bill Gates commissioned our magazine over 20 years ago to help developers better understand Microsoft tools and platforms, so that they could create top-notch applications. We've covered all the changes over the years, even though the path between Windows 1.0 and Windows Vista has been, to put it mildly, somewhat serpentine. And that's what we'll continue to do.
Thanks to Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Ben Anderson, Amit Chopra, George Chrysanthakopoulos, Dave Detlefs, Joe Duffy, Mark Fussell, Matt Gibbs, Goetz Graefe, Glenn Hackney, Tom Hollander, Jim Johnson, David Kline, Wojtek Kozaczynski, Vance Morrison, Eugenio Pace, Ayman Shoukry, Steve Sklepowich, Tandy Trower, Maura Van Der Linden, and Dave Weinstein.
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