Very sad news today in the Seattle PI -- Jeff Harbers died when his single-engine plane crashed on takeoff in Big Timber, Montana this weekend. Jeff was an incredibly bright, humorous, and effective manager of the Office group at Microsoft in the 1980's. I worked under Jeff when I was on the Excel for Windows team in the mid 80's. Though it's nearly twenty years since I've been in touch with Jeff, I remember him well, and I know he will be missed.
Recently in Microsoft Category
Most anyone who has tried Microsoft's Live.com has seen that performance is a problem. Here's what Microsoft is learning about performance from building Live.com. Scott Isaacs talks about some of the challenges inherent in building client-centric interactive applications that run in a browser. Some of the issues are reducing the number of connections to the server, XML parsing time, and server vs. client rendering. Some good insight into Microsoft's process.
From 1984 to 1987, I worked at Microsoft. For about half that time, I was a member of the Windows 1.0 development team. I joined Microsoft straight out of college. Although I’d had several summer jobs doing programming since high school, this was my first permanent job in the software industry. Here's my version of the Windows 1.0 story.
Continue reading How Windows was Born.
