Microsoft's Company Archives

Ben Armstrong, Program Manager at Microsoft, brags on his MSDN blog about Microsoft Archives, where the company stores vast amounts of records about products and press releases dating back to the early days of the company. He points out these tidbits:

• Windows 1.0 was demonstrated at the 1983 Comdex, but was never released. Windows 1.03 was the first version of Windows to be made publicly available in 1985
• Soon after releasing Microsoft BOB, we then released the 'Microsoft BOB Plus Pack'. Hmmm... Don't know what to say about that :-)
• In 1980 Microsoft actually released their own PASCAL compiler - this was something that I never knew. This compiler was maintained through to 1988.

I wish I could get a look at some of those archives. I'd probably get a lot of cool posts out of them.