“There were some things that I couldn't do because I didn't have access to the deep guts of the operating system. So I started saying, ‘Okay, I'm going to build a shell.'” “Might as well have had a neon sign saying, ‘Market Opportunity.' And it just really intrigued me.

In Windows, much of the operating system's functionality was provided by DLLs, a new concept of shared libraries with code and data that could be used by more than one program at the same time. Cooper was impressed, not by the graphical multitasking system-something he'd already written himself-but by Microsoft's dynamic-link libraries, or DLLs. On stage was Steve Ballmer, presenting the first version of Windows. In late 1985 or early 1986, a friend had brought Cooper to Microsoft's annual technical conference in Silicon Valley. But for the past month, Cooper had been frantically coding in preparation for this Microsoft demo, adding last-minute features to Tripod, a shell construction set for the Windows operating system that he'd been working on as a side project. “I was one of the first companies to realize that you could retail software without needing to sell a computer,” he recalls. In the spring of 1988, Alan Cooper sat in front of a computer in a large boardroom at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, patiently waiting for Bill Gates to arrive.Īt the time, Cooper's main business was writing desktop application software to sell to publishers.

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