Behind The Code

It seems as though all of us are actively trying to cram more and more features, functionality, and speed out of everything we use. While the world seems faster paced today than it ever has been in the past, the quest for performance and efficiency is as old as recorded history, and almost certainly…

Nick Baker is General Manager for Xbox Architectural Design. After graduating from Imperial College London in 1990, he found his way to Apple and worked on the team that tried to create a specialized video card. He then went to 3DO where he worked on their high-end gaming system, which…

Rob Short is an operating system pioneer. He helped Microsoft transition from the 1980s with DOS and 16 bit windows into the 32 bit world with Windows NT in the 1990s. More recently, Rob was part of the team that further enhanced windows to take advantage of the 64 bit processors of the new…

Don't get a real job until you're 30. This is Technical Fellow Peter Spiro's advice, and something he fell just short of doing. Discover how this forestry student got a job at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and then came to Microsoft to help build the team that drove SQL Server to the huge…

This is Behind the Code’s pilot episode with Core File Services architect, Mark Zbikowski. Mark began his career at Microsoft in 1981, working on DOS 1.0 as a designer, coder and liaison with IBM. His quarter century long career has included significant involvement in OS/2, Cairo’s Object File…

This episode features Jim Gray. He is a "Technical Fellow" in the Scaleable Servers Research Group (Sky Server, Terra Server) and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC). Jim has been called a "giant" in the fields of database and transaction processing…

What do global warming, a scientific instrument weighing about 4500 tons and bill collection have in common? The once Berkeley ‘hippie chick’ turned Software Architect Catharine van Ingen. Catharine has a wealth of experience in hardware, including work with the Alpha machine and MIPS processor…

This episode features the co-inventor of COM, software architect, Tony Williams. In his eighteen years at Microsoft, Tony has worked on the Windows team, in Microsoft Research, and on Office. His contributions benefit not just Microsoft's applications, but the fundamental way that all Windows…

It is hard to imagine a time when the internet wasn’t a part of our lives.  It has been over a decade since the Web transformed the Internet from an academic exercise into a common household name. Terry Crowley may today be hard at work focusing on the advanced features and capabilities…

A rolling stone gathers no moss. What it does gather, however, is a great deal of experience. During his long career at Microsoft, Mohsen Agsen has been actively avoiding gathering moss. LAN Manager, MCS, bCentral, Exchange, Visual Studio and … oh yes … games too. These are just a few of the…