Welcome to Microsoft: The 1994 Orientation Video for New Employees

The year was 1994, and Microsoft already dominated the market. The combination of MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 held a privileged place in millions of computers around the world, and not a few at that time wanted to join the ranks of the empire. Obviously, new Microsoft employees had to receive a series of instructions, and one of the first things to absorb was this video called Welcome to Microsoft: Employee Orientation, featuring none other than Bill Gates.

I imagine that many of our readers hadn't even been born in 1994, but thanks to the magic of the internet and online video, today we can climb into the time machine and explore what computing and technology were like back then. For example, we have the unboxing of a $3,000 computer in 1995 (just a year's difference, but the state of software was very similar), a relatively modern version of Linux running on a Pentium laptop from '94, and as if that weren't enough, a nostalgia overdose through artists like Rachid Loft.

However, there is also the official material of the companies that dominated the market in the mid-90s, with Microsoft at the forefront. In 1994, the MS-DOS/Windows combo seemed unbeatable, and by the end of that year, its market capitalization already stood at $35 billion. What I mean by this is that Microsoft was a monster, and many people wanted to be part of its legion. What did new Microsoft employees have to do upon joining the company? First, they had to watch this:

The orientation video for new Microsoft employees in 1994

The video, published by the Computer History Archives Project channel on YouTube, reviews some of the most relevant details of Microsoft, starting with the creation of Microsoft BASIC in 1975, which served as the fundamental basis for a whole series of interpreters for home computers. One of Bill Gates's first sound bites in the video mentions microprocessors. As early as 1971 (the year the Intel 4004 debuted) Gates and Paul Allen had studied their potential: Allen was convinced, but in the video we see that Gates was a bit more skeptical about their growth.

Fortran, COBOL, offices in Asia and Washington, hardware development for the Apple II (the Z-80 SoftCard), Flight Simulator, restructuring, the launch of MS-DOS… the video has a fairly intense pace in some of its passages, but Bill Gates appears in another segment talking about the Microsoft Mouse, whose first version dates back to May 1983. Gates says it took them a year to sell the first 50,000 units, and for a moment he thought they had made a mistake in betting on that accessory.

The launch of Word, the delays in the debut of Windows, the creation of software for the Macintosh, and the entry into the public market in March 1986 are also mentioned in the video, which quickly becomes a history lesson about Microsoft… a rather biased and favorable one, I should add. In total, it's fifteen minutes that fans of retrocomputing shouldn't miss, and this extends to all the channel's content, with material about IBM, Dell, and other industry giants.

Computer History Archives Project: Click here