Architecture (Несколько текстов для зачёта), страница 9

Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Corporation, leading American computer software company. Microsoft develops and sells a wide variety of software products to businesses and consumers in more than 50 countries. The company’s Windows operating systems for personal computers are the most widely used operating systems in the world. Microsoft has its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft’s other well-known products include Word, a word processor; Excel, a spreadsheet program; Access, a database program; and PowerPoint, a program for making business presentations. These programs are sold separately and as part of Office, an integrated software suite. The company also makes BackOffice, an integrated set of server products for businesses. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer allows users to browse the World Wide Web. Among the company’s other products are reference applications; games; financial software; programming languages for software developers; input devices, such as pointing devices and keyboards; and computer-related books.

Microsoft operates The Microsoft Network (MSN), a collection of news, travel, financial, entertainment, and information Web sites. Microsoft and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) jointly operate MSNBC, a 24-hour news, talk, and information cable-television channel and companion Web site.

Microsoft was founded in 1975 by William H. Gates III and Paul Allen. The pair had teamed up in high school through their hobby of programming on the original PDP-10 computer from the Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1975 Popular Electronics magazine featured a cover story about the Altair 8800, the first personal computer. The article inspired Gates and Allen to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair. They licensed the software to Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the Altair’s manufacturer, and formed Microsoft (originally Micro-soft) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to develop versions of BASIC for other computer companies. Microsoft’s early customers included fledgling hardware firms such as Apple Computer, maker of the Apple II computer; Commodore, maker of the PET computer; and Tandy Corporation, maker of the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. In 1977 Microsoft shipped its second language product, Microsoft Fortran, and it soon released versions of BASIC for the 8080 and 8086 microprocessors.

In 1979 Gates and Allen moved the company to Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of their hometown of Seattle. (The company moved to its current headquarters in Redmond in 1986.) In 1980 International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) chose Microsoft to write the operating system for the IBM PC personal computer, to be introduced the following year. Under time pressure, Microsoft purchased 86-DOS (originally called QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle programmer Tim Paterson for $50,000, modified it, and renamed it MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System). As part of its contract with IBM, Microsoft was permitted to license the operating system to other companies. By 1984 Microsoft had licensed MS-DOS to 200 personal computer manufacturers, making MS-DOS the standard operating system for personal computers and driving Microsoft’s enormous growth in the 1980s. Allen left the company in 1983 but remained on its board of directors until 2000.

As sales of MS-DOS took off, Microsoft began to develop business applications for personal computers. In 1982 it released Multiplan, a spreadsheet program, and the following year it released a word-processing program, Microsoft Word. In 1984 Microsoft was one of the few established software companies to develop application software for the Macintosh, a personal computer developed by Apple Computer. Microsoft’s early support for the Macintosh resulted in tremendous success for its Macintosh application software, including Word, Excel, and Works (an integrated software suite). Multiplan for MS-DOS, however, faltered against the popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program made by Lotus Development Corporation.

In 1985 Microsoft released Windows, an operating system that extended the features of MS-DOS and employed a graphical user interface. Windows 2.0, released in 1987, improved performance and offered a new visual appearance. In 1990 Microsoft released a more powerful version, Windows 3.0, which was followed by Windows 3.1 and 3.11. These versions, which came preinstalled on most new personal computers, rapidly became the most widely used operating systems. In 1990 Microsoft became the first personal-computer software company to record $1 billion in annual sales.

As Microsoft’s dominance grew in the market for personal-computer operating systems, the company was accused of monopolistic business practices. In 1990 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began investigating Microsoft for alleged anticompetitive practices, but it was unable to reach a decision and dropped the case. The United States Department of Justice continued the probe.

In 1991 Microsoft and IBM ended a decade of collaboration when they went separate ways on the next generation of operating systems for personal computers. IBM chose to pursue the OS/2 operating system (first released in 1987), which until then had been a joint venture with Microsoft. Microsoft chose to evolve its Windows operating system into increasingly powerful systems. In 1993 Apple lost a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Microsoft that claimed Windows illegally copied the design of the Macintosh’s graphical interface. The ruling was later upheld by an appellate court.

In 1993 Microsoft released Windows NT, an operating system for business environments. The following year the company and the Justice Department reached an agreement that called for Microsoft to change the way its operating system software was sold and licensed to computer manufacturers. In 1995 the company released Windows 95, which featured a simplified interface, multitasking, and other improvements. An estimated 7 million copies of Windows 95 were sold worldwide within seven weeks of its release.

In the mid-1990s Microsoft began to expand into the media, entertainment, and communications industries, launching The Microsoft Network in 1995 and MSNBC in 1996. Also in 1996 Microsoft introduced Windows CE, an operating system for handheld personal computers. In 1997 Microsoft paid $425 million to acquire WebTV Networks, a manufacturer of low-cost devices to connect televisions to the Internet. That same year Microsoft invested $1 billion in Comcast Corporation, a U.S. cable television operator, as part of an effort to expand the availability of high-speed connections to the Internet.

In June 1998 Microsoft released Windows 98, which featured integrated Internet capabilities. In the following month Gates appointed Steve Ballmer, executive vice president of Microsoft, as the company’s president, transferring to him supervision of most day-to-day business operations of the company. Gates retained the title of chairman and chief executive officer (CEO).

In 1999 Microsoft paid $5 billion to telecommunications company AT&T Corp. to use Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system in devices designed to provide consumers with integrated cable television, telephone, and high-speed Internet services. Also in 1999, the company released Windows 2000, the latest version of the Windows NT operating system. In January 2000 Gates transferred his title of CEO to Ballmer. Gates, in turn, took on the title of chief software architect to focus on the development of new products and technologies.

In late 1997 the Justice Department accused Microsoft of violating its 1994 agreement by requiring computer manufacturers that installed Windows 95 to also include Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s software for browsing the Internet. The government contended that Microsoft was illegally taking advantage of its power in the market for computer operating systems to gain control of the market for Internet browsers. In response, Microsoft argued that it should have the right to enhance the functionality of Windows by integrating Internet-related features into the operating system. Also in late 1997, computer company Sun Microsystems sued Microsoft, alleging that it had breached a contract for use of Sun’s Java universal programming language by introducing Windows-only enhancements. In November 1998 a federal district court ruled against Microsoft on an injunction filed by Sun earlier that year. The injunction forced Microsoft to revise its software to meet Sun’s Java compatibility standards. The two companies settled the case in 2001, with Microsoft agreeing to pay Sun $20 million for limited use of Java.

Microsoft temporarily settled with the Justice Department in its antitrust case in early 1998 by agreeing to allow personal computer manufacturers to offer a version of Windows 95 that did not include access to Internet Explorer. However, in May 1998 the Justice Department and 20 states filed broad antitrust suits charging Microsoft with engaging in anticompetitive conduct. The suits sought to force Microsoft to offer Windows without Internet Explorer or to include Navigator, a competing browser made by Netscape Communications Corporation. The suits also challenged some of the company’s contracts and pricing strategies.

The federal antitrust trial against Microsoft began in October 1998. Executives from Netscape, Sun, and several other computer software and hardware companies testified regarding their business deals with Microsoft. In November 1999 Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact in the antitrust case, in which he declared that Microsoft had a monopoly in the market for personal computer operating systems. In 2000 Jackson ruled that the company had violated antitrust laws by engaging in tactics that discouraged competition. He ordered Microsoft to be split into two companies: one for operating systems and another for all other businesses, including its Office software suite. He also imposed a number of interim restrictions on the company’s business practices. The judge put these penalties on hold while Microsoft appealed the decision.

In June 2001 an appeals court upheld Jackson’s findings that Microsoft had monopoly power and that the company used anticompetitive business practices to protect its Windows monopoly. However, the appeals court threw out the trial court’s ruling that Microsoft had illegally integrated Internet Explorer into Windows, returning the issue to a lower court for review under a different legal standard. The appeals court also reversed Jackson’s order to break up the company, in part because of the judge’s failure to hold a proper hearing on the remedy and in part because of comments he made to reporters outside the courtroom about the merits of the case. The court found that Jackson’s comments were improper because they created the appearance of bias, even though the court found no evidence of actual bias. The appeals court ordered that the case be assigned to a different judge to reconsider the remedy for Microsoft’s violations of antitrust law.

Browser

Browser, in computer science, a program that enables a computer to locate, download, and display documents containing text, sound, video, graphics, animation, and photographs located on computer networks. The act of viewing and moving about between documents on computer networks is called browsing. Users browse through documents on open, public-access networks called internets, or on closed networks called intranets. The largest open network is the Internet, a worldwide computer network that provides access to sites on the World Wide Web (WWW, the Web).

Browsers allow users to access Web information by locating documents on remote computers that function as Web servers. A browser downloads information over phone lines to a user’s computer through the user’s modem and then displays the information on the computer. Most browsers can display a variety of text and graphics that may be integrated into such a document, including animation, audio and video. Examples of browsers are Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Mosaic.

Browsers can create the illusion of traveling to an actual location in virtual space (hyperspace) where the document being viewed exists. This virtual location in hyperspace is referred to as a node, or a Web site. The process of virtual travel between Web sites is called navigating.

Documents on networks are called hypertext if the media is text only, or hypermedia if the media includes graphics as well as text. Every hypertext or hypermedia document on an internet has a unique address called a uniform resource locator (URL). Hypertext documents usually contain references to other URLs that appear in bold, underlined, or colored text. The user can connect to the site indicated by the URL by clicking on it. This use of a URL within a Web site is known as a hyperlink. When the user clicks on a hyperlink, the browser moves to this next server and downloads and displays the document targeted by the link. Using this method, browsers can rapidly take users back and forth between different sites.