sorry if youre here for a history of the company, im into the operating systems.. 人(_ _*)
windows is a company created by microsoft on november 20th, 1985. within that same year, windows 1.0 was born. 1.0 all the way up to windows ME ran off a foundation of MS DOS, while 95 through NT 4.0 ran off of windows 9x and a base of MS DOS. windows 2000 through 11 all run off of a windows NT kernel, no longer having the MS DOS base.
the most influential operating system was windows XP, being the first version of windows that could both run classic windows programs, AND run games well. previous versions of windows did NOT run games well, to put it lightly. Which makes sense why vista, one of the most universally hated (with good reason) operating systems ever, being its sucessor was a huge letdown for everyone. the hate for this operating system was so widespread that it even has its own wikipedia article.