Gordon Letwin
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Gordon Letwin
James Gordon Letwin (born July 2, 1952) is an American software developer and one of the eleven early Microsoft employees who posed for an iconic staff portrait taken in Albuquerque in 1978. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked for Heathkit, porting ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' to the computer and working on HDOS and Benton Harbor BASIC. Letwin's first project at Microsoft was writing a BASIC compiler. He is most noted for being the lead architect of the OS/2 operating system on the Microsoft side, with Ed Iacobucci being the lead architect from IBM's side. Letwin contributed much of the design and code for several core components, including the HPFS file system. Letwin left Microsoft in 1993 to "kick back" with his wife. While at Microsoft he had become a millionaire, with a 2000 ''Time'' article estimating his worth at around $20 million. Since leaving Microsoft, Letwin has donated substantial amounts of money to environmental causes via the Wilburforce Foundation, a char ...
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Software Developer
Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, Computer programming, programming, software documentation, documenting, software testing, testing, and Software bugs, bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining application software, applications, software framework, frameworks, or other software components. Software development involves writing and Software maintenance, maintaining the source code, but in a broader sense, it includes all processes from the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, typically in a planned and Software development process, structured process. Software development also includes research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products. Methodologies One system development methodology is not necessarily suitable for use by all projects. Each of the available methodologies are best suited to ...
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Operating System
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, printing, and other resources. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or is interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer from cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers. The dominant general-purpose personal computer operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 74.99%. macOS by Apple Inc. is in second place (14.84%), and ...
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Microsoft Employees
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washington, United States. Its best-known software products are the Microsoft Windows, Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office Productivity software#Office suite, suite, and the Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's List of the largest software companies, largest software maker by revenue as of 2019. It is one of the Big Tech, Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet ...
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Microsoft Adventure
''Microsoft Adventure'' is a 1979 interactive fiction game from Microsoft, based on the PDP-10 mainframe game '' Colossal Cave Adventure'', and released for the TRS-80, Apple II, and later for the IBM PC. It was programmed for the company by Gordon Letwin of Softwin Associates. Gameplay ''Microsoft Adventure'' is a text game of cave exploration and treasure gathering where the player enters one- or two-word commands to direct the computer to move and manipulate objects, and points are awarded for areas explored and for treasure acquired. It contains 130 rooms, 15 treasures, 40 useful objects and 12 problems to be solved. The progress of two games can be saved on a diskette. The game features most of the content as ''Colossal Cave Adventure'', along with a few locations unique to this version. Release Microsoft originally released ''Microsoft Adventure'' in 1979 for the TRS-80 and the Apple II under its new division, Microsoft Consumer Products. IBM later included ''Microsoft Adv ...
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History Of Microsoft
Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its current best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system; Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software; Xbox, a line of entertainment of games, music, and video; Bing, a line of search engines; and Microsoft Azure, a cloud services platform. In 1980, Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM to bundle Microsoft's operating system with IBM computers; with that deal, IBM paid Microsoft a royalty for every sale. In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2. Microsoft Windows eventually overshadowed OS/2 in terms of sales. When Microsoft launched several versions of Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, they had ...
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File System
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stopped and the next began, or where any piece of data was located when it was time to retrieve it. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the data are easily isolated and identified. Taking its name from the way a paper-based data management system is named, each group of data is called a "file". The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of data and their names is called a "file system." There are many kinds of file systems, each with unique structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size and more. Some file systems have been designed to be used for specific applications. For example, the ISO 9660 file system is designe ...
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High Performance File System
HPFS (High Performance File System) is a file system created specifically for the OS/2 operating system to improve upon the limitations of the FAT file system. It was written by Gordon Letwin and others at Microsoft and added to OS/2 version 1.2, at that time still a joint undertaking of Microsoft and IBM, and released in 1988. Overview Compared with FAT, HPFS provided a number of additional capabilities: *Support for mixed case file names, in different code pages *Support for long file names (255 characters as opposed to FAT's 8.3 naming scheme) *More efficient use of disk space (files are not stored using multiple-sector clusters but on a per-sector basis) *An internal architecture that keeps related items close to each other on the disk volume *Less fragmentation of data * Extent-based space allocation *Separate datestamps for last modification, last access, and creation (as opposed to last-modification-only datestamp in then-times implementations of FAT) *B+ tree struc ...
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Ed Iacobucci
Edward E. Iacobucci (September 26, 1953 – June 21, 2013) was an Argentine-American businessman who founded VirtualWorks and co–founded Citrix Systems. He is also known for his work as the architectural designer of the OS/2 and IBM DOS systems and as a virtualization pioneer. Biography Early years and education Edward "Ed" E. Iacobucci was born September 26, 1953, in Buenos Aires, Argentina to Dr. Guillermo and Costantina Iacobucci. His father, a biochemist, moved his family to the U.S. in 1960 to work first for E.R. Squibb & Sons (a predecessor to pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb), and then Coca-Cola. Roberto Goizueta, then Chairman of Coca-Cola, became a close friend of the Iacobucci family and, subsequently, Ed's godfather. Iacobucci graduated from Georgia Tech with a BSc in systems engineering in 1975. Career Iacobucci began his career at IBM in 1979 where he worked on the commercial software and personal computer business. While at IBM, Iacobucci held archite ...
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OS/2
OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 relative to Microsoft's new Windows 3.1 operating environment, the two companies severed the relationship in 1992 and OS/2 development fell to IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's " Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers. The first version of OS/2 was released in December 1987 and newer versions were released until December 2001. OS/2 was intended as a protected-mode successor of PC DOS. Notably, basic system calls were modeled after MS-DOS calls; their names even started with "Dos" and it was possible to create "Family Mode" applications – text mode applications that could work on both systems. Be ...
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Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washington, United States. Its best-known software products are the 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. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2019. It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to do ...
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