Storied Windows dev reminisces about Microsoft’s first hardware product 45 years ago — the Z-80 SoftCard was an Apple II add-in card

Storied Windows dev reminisces about Microsoft's first hardware product 45 years ago — the Z-80 SoftCard was an Apple II add-in card

Remember, Microsoft only officially became a ‘software and devices’ firm in 2013. It was already firmly in the console market by then, but the refocus seems to have helped propel the extensive line of Surface products we saw at that time.

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Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

Shiznizzle Say what you want about M$ software and practices. Their hardware is on some other level of quality indeed. Every single M$ hardware product ive ever owned has been exceptionally well made and its endurance needs to have it own category. From my Keyboard, a DIN9- PS/2, , the one and only one i, still, use as ive not been forced to upgrade it yet, to the Precision Pro USB joystick that lasted 12 years. I used that joystick starting on the old MSN Gaming Zone to play Fighter Ace 1.5. I played that game till the day it died. Hours in the evenings. I used that stick through all version of MSCFS. I used it to play EAW and its mods. All of the Janes games at the time. USAF, WW2 Fighters, IAF, the F15. The joystick did not break and it was not even of the hall sensor type but a potentio meter type. You buy one of them today and they wont even last you a year. I am typing this on a keyboard where i spent entire months in real time pressing buttons in WoW during dungeons runs. I no longer play wow. I played on all sorts of private servers and had fleets of alts to support mains on each server. From start to max level. All on this keyboard. The thing has seen millions of keystrokes on the 1-4 buttons alone. I resolved to buy another one when this one dies. They are going cheap. The level of quality that M$ hardware has is insane. Its out of this world. The endurance and durability of their stuff is simply mind boggling. Reply

Aaron Priest I owned one of these Microsoft Cordless Phones back around 1998. It was a pretty decent hardware and worked well, though the software for fax and answering machine could get buggy until a reboot. It never got support for Windows NT or 2000 though, nor XP, and 2.4Ghz and spread spectrum and better cordless standards made it go obsolete too soon. The speech recognition and synthesis was actually very good for it's day. https://www.techeblog.com/microsoft-cordless-phone-system-1998-speech-recognition/ Reply

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