Windows Pioneers

Last updated July 14, 2019

The Windows Pioneers are the seven individuals who received awards from Microsoft in 1994 in recognition of their contributions to Microsoft Windows. Bill Gates presented each pioneer with an award.

Microsoft U.S.-headquartered technology company

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge Web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. As of 2016, it is the world's largest software maker by revenue, and one of the world's most valuable companies. The word "Microsoft" is a portmanteau of "microcomputer" and "software". Microsoft is ranked No. 30 in the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Microsoft Windows families include Windows NT and Windows IoT; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Server or Windows Embedded Compact. Defunct Microsoft Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.

William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, and humanitarian. He is best known as the principal founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014.

The seven Windows Pioneers were:^[1]

Alan Cooper – the "father of Visual Basic"^[2]
Lyle Griffin – created Micrografx Designer, the earliest graphics application for Windows
Joe Guthridge – led the development of Samna Amí, the first Windows word processor, later renamed Lotus Word Pro
Ted Johnson – led the development of PageMaker desktop publishing software. Co-founder of Visio Corporation
Ian Koenig – led the development of the Reuters Terminal financial information software
Ray Ozzie – created Lotus Notes.^[3] Would later (2005–2010) serve as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect
Charles Petzold – author of Programming Windows series from Microsoft Press, as well as many other programming books for Microsoft

Alan Cooper American computer programmer

Alan Cooper is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is also known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products. On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows "for his invention of the visual development environment in Visual BASIC, and for his pioneering work in establishing the field of interaction design and its fundamental tools."

Visual Basic is a third-generation event-driven programming language from Microsoft for its Component Object Model (COM) programming model first released in 1991 and declared legacy during 2008. Microsoft intended Visual Basic to be relatively easy to learn and use. Visual Basic was derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.

Joe Guthridge is best known for his contributions to the development of a family of Word Processing software that began in the 1980s. Software from that original work is still being used as of 201x.

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Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6, which was discontinued in 2008, and its associated integrated development environment (IDE). Although Visual Basic is no longer supported or updated by Microsoft, the VBA programming language was upgraded in 2010 with the introduction of Visual Basic for Applications 7 in Microsoft Office applications.

Lotus Software was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018.

Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet program developed by Borland and now sold by Corel, most often as part of Corel's WordPerfect Office suite.

LotusScript is an object oriented programming language used by Lotus Notes and other IBM Lotus Software products.

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Claris was a computer software developer formed as a spin-off from Apple Computer in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were owned by Apple, notably MacWrite and MacPaint, in order to separate Apple's application software activities from its hardware and operating systems activities.

Raymond "Ray" Ozzie is an American software industry entrepreneur who held the positions of Chief Technical Officer and Chief Software Architect at Microsoft between 2005 and 2010. Before Microsoft, he was best known for his role in creating IBM Notes.

Microsoft Visual Studio Express is a set of integrated development environments (IDEs) developed by Microsoft as a freeware and registerware function-limited version of the non-free Microsoft Visual Studio. Express editions started with Visual Studio 2005.

Lotus Word Pro is a word processor software produced by IBM's Lotus Software group for use on Microsoft Windows-compatible computers and on IBM OS/2 Warp. Word Pro can be obtained as part of the Lotus SmartSuite office suite.

Paradox is a relational database management system currently published by Corel Corporation. It was originally released for MS-DOS by Ansa Software, and then by Borland after it bought the company. A Windows version was released by Borland in 1992. It was last updated in 2008.

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Forethought, Inc. was a computer software company, best known as developers of what is now Microsoft PowerPoint.

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The Xojo programming environment and programming language is developed and commercially marketed by Xojo, Inc. of Austin, Texas for software development targeting macOS, Microsoft Windows, Linux, iOS, the Web and Raspberry Pi. Xojo uses a proprietary object-oriented BASIC dialect, formerly known as REALbasic, but now known as Xojo.

References

↑ Press Release on microsoft.com (Jeff Raikes, Group Vice President, Microsoft Information Worker Business)
↑ Waite, Mitchell (1992). The Waite Group's Visual Basic How-To. Waite Group Press. ISBN 1-878739-09-3, ISBN 978-1-878739-09-4, pp. dedication page
↑ "Microsoft's Top Software Architect, a Cloud Computing Advocate, Quits". New York Times . October 18, 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-19. ... Heralded as one of the world’s great programmers, Mr. Ozzie, before working for Microsoft, steered the creation of Lotus Notes, a popular e-mail and collaborative workspace software package. Then, during the dot-com boom, he started Groove Networks, another collaboration software maker, that swapped data using more modern techniques. ...

External links

Ted Johnson bio on Microsoft's site

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[1] Press Release on microsoft.com (Jeff Raikes, Group Vice President, Microsoft Information Worker Business)

[2] Waite, Mitchell (1992). The Waite Group's Visual Basic How-To. Waite Group Press. ISBN 1-878739-09-3, ISBN 978-1-878739-09-4, pp. dedication page

[3] "Microsoft's Top Software Architect, a Cloud Computing Advocate, Quits". New York Times . October 18, 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-19. ... Heralded as one of the world’s great programmers, Mr. Ozzie, before working for Microsoft, steered the creation of Lotus Notes, a popular e-mail and collaborative workspace software package. Then, during the dot-com boom, he started Groove Networks, another collaboration software maker, that swapped data using more modern techniques. ...