Browsing by Subject "Microsoft Corporation."

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Orah history interview with Mike Maples
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2004-05-07) Maples, Mike
    After describing his substantial career at IBM where he was involved in display products and then with PCs, Mike Maples talks about joining Microsoft and managing its applications products. He discusses in detail his management philosophy at Microsoft and contrasts it with the IBM approach. He covers Microsoft’s successful recruiting practices and how product decisions were made. Maples also describes how development processes evolved and how Microsoft Office was designed and built. The selection of platform focus and decisions on the release of application program interface information are explained. Finally, he details why he left Microsoft and how he did so in a planned and structured fashion.
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    Oral history interview with Ben Dyer
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2004-05-07) Dyer, Ben
    Ben Dyer, an industrial engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, describes joining the Computer System Center, one of the earliest computer stores in the United States.. He then switched to providing accounting software for minicomputers which led to Peachtree Software with accounting programs for CP/M computers. IBM identified Peachtree accounting software as a principal product for the IBM PC and provided funding for its development to run under PC/MS DOS. Dyer describes the purchase of Peachtree Software by MSA and its subsequent divestiture. Finally, Dyer discusses his activities post-Peachtree.
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    Oral history interview with Charles Antony Richard Hoare
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2002-07-17) Hoare, C. A. R. (Charles Antony Richard), 1934-
    Sir Antony Hoare is Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, and Research/Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford. Hoare is the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages. He has also been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for pioneering and fundamental contributions to software science. In this oral history Hoare recounts his personal involvement in the development of academic computing science and education at The Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and at the University of Oxford. He discusses his long-time interest in building bridges between university computing science departments and industry. Hoare also details his current work at Microsoft Research in applying assertions and other scientific techniques and theory to industrial operations. He discusses his advocacy of assertions in the maintenance and transformation of legacy code. Hoare also comments on a number of other subjects, including machine translation of languages, artificial intelligence, reasoning under uncertainty, software design and reliability, and project management. The interview includes a discussion of the problem of the preservation and interpretation of code.
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    Oral history interview with James Bidzos
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2004-12-11) Bidzos, James
    James Bidzos begins by discussing his early career at IBM and as an international businessman in IT. He then moves on to describe how he came to take the helm of struggling software security firm RSA Data Security. He relates a number of early business challenges in financing and technology at this firm as it sought to commercialize encryption technology that extended from the research of MIT’s Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman—work that in turn built upon the invention of public key cryptography by Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie, and Ralph Merkle at Stanford University. In discussing how RSA developed into the leading software security firm, Bidzos describes the challenges posed by the government’s attempts to control the dissemination of encryption technology through export laws and other means. An important forum for debate on such issues (and later issues like the Clipper Chip) was the annual RSA Conference, a meeting that Bidzos initiated that included individuals from industry, government, and computer scientists, and evolved to become the leading annual event in the computer/software security field. Finally, Bidzos discusses the commercialization of encryption for authentication (signatures) by partnering with other major firms to found VeriSign.
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    Oral History Interview with Jim Gray
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2002-01-03) Gray, Jim, 1944-
    Gray discusses his childhood in Rome and education at the University of California, Berkeley. He explains the influence of Sputnik, Norbert Wiener’s view of cybernetics and society, the social impact of computing, and the artificial intelligence papers of Newell and Simon in the shaping of his career. Gray describes his co-op position at General Dynamics, as well as positions with Bell Labs (Murray Hill) and IBM Research in Yorktown Heights and San Jose. Gray also describes his evaluations of computer models stimulated by the system dynamics approach pioneered by Jay Forrester, his brief role as a UNESCO technical expert in Romania, and his introduction to relational database design. The interview includes comments on computer privacy and research laboratory culture at International Business Machines, Tandem Computers, and Microsoft.