110 Fun Facts About Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and which childhood friend?

Paul Allen, who had known Gates since their Seattle school days, had already run Traf-O-Data with him, selling a rudimentary computer for analysing road-traffic counts.

The company's name, first written with a hyphen, was coined by a co-founder from what two words?

A co-founder coined 'Micro-Soft' as a blend of micro-computer software; the hyphen went when the name was registered in New Mexico in 1976, and the company was formally established on April 4, 1975, with Gates as CEO.

Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter for which early microcomputer?

Altair BASIC was written for the MITS Altair 8800; Gates told MITS he had a working interpreter before writing a line of code, yet the March 1975 demonstration worked flawlessly.

In which city was Microsoft based when it demonstrated Altair BASIC in 1975?

MITS, the microcomputer maker that licensed its BASIC, was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so Microsoft set up there in 1975; the company moved to the Seattle area in January 1979.

Microsoft's headquarters are in which Washington city?

The move from Bellevue to Redmond came on February 26, 1986, weeks before the company's stock market debut.

MS-DOS began life as a product Microsoft bought from Seattle Computer Products called what?

Tim Paterson's 86-DOS (originally QDOS) was bought for about $75,000 in all in 1981; IBM wanted a CP/M-style system for its PC, and Microsoft crucially kept the right to license the rebranded MS-DOS to others.

Microsoft's first operating system, released in 1980 before MS-DOS, was a licensed version of what?

Called Xenix, it was licensed from AT&T a year earlier.

Windows 1.0 was released on November 20 of which year?

Windows 1.0 shipped on November 20, 1985, as a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS, two years after its announcement; Microsoft was simultaneously co-developing OS/2 with IBM.

Microsoft's 1986 stock market debut is estimated to have made how many employees millionaires?

The rise in the stock after its NASDAQ listing on March 13, 1986, is estimated to have made about 12,000 employees millionaires and four of them billionaires.

Gates's co-founder left day-to-day work at the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with what?

The diagnosis was Hodgkin's lymphoma, treated with radiation; he recovered and went on to own the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers, dying in 2018 of complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Bill Gates dropped out of which university to build Microsoft?

Gates enrolled at Harvard in 1973 and took Math 55, the notoriously hard freshman course, before leaving in 1975 to work on Microsoft full-time.

At which private Seattle academy did the two founders meet and first get access to a computer?

Lakeside School's Mothers' Club bought time on a Teletype terminal in 1968, and the two future founders, two school years apart, taught themselves programming on it.

The company's text-editing application was first released in 1983 under what longer title?

Multi-Tool Word, renamed Microsoft Word soon after its 1983 debut, was developed by Charles Simonyi, hired from Xerox PARC; free demo copies on floppy were bundled with PC World magazine.

Bill Gates announced Excel in 1985 at a joint press conference with which rival?

Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple unveiled Excel together in New York that May because the first versions ran only on the Macintosh; the aim was to beat Lotus 1-2-3, which had crushed Microsoft's earlier Multiplan.

Microsoft bought PowerPoint in 1987, for about $14 million, from which company?

Forethought Inc. of Sunnyvale, whose Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin had created the program, sold it to Microsoft in July 1987; the first version ran only on Macintosh and was designed for producing overhead transparencies.

In which year did Microsoft Office first appear for Windows?

Office for Windows arrived in 1990, a year after the Macintosh bundle, and Windows 3.0 launched the same year; both products became dominant in their fields.

Which Rolling Stones song did the Windows 95 launch campaign use, a nod to the new button?

'Start Me Up' ran in the Windows 95 television ads as a nod to the new Start button; the Rolling Stones took a reported multimillion-dollar fee, and the New York Times called it the splashiest product launch in industry history.

Windows 95 introduced long file names of up to how many characters?

Windows 95's VFAT file system allowed file names of up to 255 characters, ending the MS-DOS 8.3 limit, while keeping a short alias for older programs.

Microsoft Bob, the cartoon-house interface released in March 1995, featured which animated guide?

Rover the dog was the default guide around the cartoon house; the product was discontinued in early 1996 and is regularly listed among the worst products in tech history.

Comic Sans was drawn to replace which typeface in Microsoft Bob's cartoon speech bubbles?

Vincent Connare saw a 1994 Microsoft Bob beta in which cartoon characters spoke in Times New Roman speech bubbles and drew Comic Sans, modelled on comic-book lettering, as a friendlier substitute.

The animated Office Assistant everyone calls Clippy is officially named what?

The paperclip's official name was Clippit, one of several Office Assistants alongside a cat, a dog and a robot; it became a byword for annoying software and was switched off by default in Office XP.

Windows Solitaire, included since Windows 3.0 in 1990, was programmed by whom?

An intern named Wes Cherry wrote Solitaire in 1989 and was never paid royalties for it; Susan Kare, who drew the original Macintosh icons, designed the card deck.

Windows XP's default wallpaper Bliss was photographed in 1996 in which region?

Charles O'Rear, a former National Geographic photographer, shot the hill on the road between Napa and Sonoma, California, on medium-format Velvia film, which is why the greens are so vivid.

Windows XP was released on October 25 of which year?

Windows XP went on sale on October 25, 2001, unifying the consumer and NT lines on the NT codebase; the first Xbox followed three weeks later.

Bill Gates handed the CEO job to Steve Ballmer in January 2000 and took what new title for himself?

Gates became Chief Software Architect, a title he held until Ray Ozzie took it in 2006, while remaining chairman; Ballmer, an old college friend who had joined in 1980, took over as CEO.

Before joining Microsoft, Steve Ballmer worked as an assistant product manager at which company?

At Procter & Gamble he shared an office with Jeff Immelt, later CEO of General Electric; he then tried screenwriting in Hollywood and attended Stanford's business school before joining Microsoft in 1980.

Which NBA franchise did Steve Ballmer buy in 2014?

Ballmer paid a then-record $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014, months after stepping down as Microsoft CEO in February that year.

The original Xbox launched in November 2001 alongside which game, its signature title?

Halo: Combat Evolved shipped with the console on launch day, November 15; Microsoft had bought its developer, Bungie, in June 2000 and turned the game into the Xbox's flagship launch title.

The idea for the Xbox came from four engineers on which Microsoft team?

The name is a nod to DirectX; the console was designed to compete with Sony's PlayStation 2.

Microsoft's motion-sensing camera controller, first released in November 2010, was called what?

Kinect launched for the Xbox 360 on November 4, 2010, and sold eight million units in its first 60 days; an upgraded version was bundled with the Xbox One in 2013.

Microsoft's Zune, launched in 2006, was made in cooperation with which Japanese company?

The first Zune was built with Toshiba, whose Gigabeat S player it was based on; the hardware was dropped in 2011 and the brand retired in 2012, having never seriously dented the iPod's lead.

Microsoft's 2010 Windows Phone interface used a flat design language codenamed what?

Metro, the flat typography-led style of Windows Phone 7, spread across Microsoft's logos, the Xbox dashboard and Windows 8 in 2011 and 2012 before the name was dropped over a trademark dispute.

In 2011 the company made its then-largest acquisition, buying which communications app for $8.5 billion?

Skype was shut down in May 2025 so Microsoft could focus on Teams.

The Surface, unveiled in June 2012, was notable as the company's first what?

Surface was Microsoft's first PC with hardware built in-house, designed by its own team rather than by Windows partners such as Dell and HP; the Xbox had been its only earlier computer-class device.

Which company's mobile phone business did Microsoft buy in a deal announced in 2013?

Nokia's devices and services unit became Microsoft Mobile in 2014; within two years Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion and laid off 7,800 people.

Satya Nadella became Microsoft's CEO on February 4, 2014, having previously led which division?

Nadella had run the Cloud and Enterprise group, earlier called Server and Tools, before taking over from Ballmer on February 4, 2014; born in Hyderabad in 1967, he refocused the company on cloud computing.

Which game studio, maker of Minecraft, did Microsoft buy in September 2014 for $2.5 billion?

Mojang, the Stockholm studio behind Minecraft, was bought in September 2014 for $2.5 billion; Minecraft went on to become the best-selling video game of all time, passing 300 million copies in 2023.

Minecraft was originally created in Java by which Swedish developer?

Jens Bergensten took over development after the full release; Persson had previously worked at the browser-game maker King.

Which professional networking site did the company buy in 2016 for $26.2 billion?

LinkedIn was bought in December 2016 for $26.2 billion, then the company's largest purchase, and kept running as a largely independent unit under its own chief executive.

How long after its March 2016 launch was Microsoft's chatbot Tay shut down for offensive tweets?

Tay was pulled about 16 hours after going live on March 23, 2016, once trolls had taught it to post racist tweets; the name stood for 'thinking about you' and it was billed as 'the AI with zero chill'.

Which rival operating system did Steve Ballmer call a 'cancer' in 2001?

Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation in November 2016 at $500,000 a year, a move analysts had once deemed unthinkable.

Which code-hosting platform did Microsoft buy in 2018 for $7.5 billion?

The GitHub deal was announced on June 4 and closed on October 26, 2018, paid in Microsoft stock; GitHub kept operating independently under new chief executive Nat Friedman.

Microsoft became the third US public company valued at over $1 trillion in which year?

Microsoft first closed above $1 trillion in April 2019, after Apple and Amazon in 2018, and went on to pass $2 trillion in June 2021 on pandemic-era cloud and gaming demand.

In 2021 a new OS version caused confusion because its maker had earlier called which version the last ever?

A Microsoft developer evangelist had said in 2015 that Windows 10 would be 'the last version of Windows', so Windows 11's arrival on October 5, 2021 surprised many.

The company's biggest acquisition, completed in 2023, was which game publisher for $68.7 billion?

Activision Blizzard, maker of Call of Duty, was absorbed on October 13, 2023 after a 21-month regulatory fight; Phil Spencer heads the Microsoft Gaming division that also houses ZeniMax and Xbox Game Studios.

The company's cloud computing platform, a rival to Amazon Web Services, is called what?

Azure, announced as Windows Azure in 2008 and launched in February 2010, runs on Microsoft's own data centres; the Cobalt CPU and Maia AI chip unveiled in 2023 were designed for it.

Microsoft announced a multi-billion-dollar deal in January 2023 with which ChatGPT developer?

The January 2023 deal extended Microsoft's OpenAI investment to a reported $10 billion; that November Microsoft announced it would hire OpenAI's ousted CEO Sam Altman, only for him to be reinstated within days.

Which 24-hour cable news channel did Microsoft co-found with NBC in 1996?

MSNBC launched on July 15, 1996 as a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC; NBC took control of the channel in 2005 by buying most of Microsoft's stake, and the msnbc.com website partnership ended in July 2012.

The EU's 2004 fine forced the company to sell XP editions stripped of which program?

The European Commission's March 2004 ruling, with a 497 million euro fine, required Windows XP Home Edition N and Professional N to ship without Windows Media Player.

Bill Gates's internal 1995 memo that turned the company toward the web was titled what?

Gates's 'Internet Tidal Wave' memo, dated May 26, 1995, gave the internet 'the highest level of importance' and named Netscape as the chief threat; it is credited with letting Microsoft catch the web early.

The company's first international office, opened in the late 1970s, was in which country?

The first office abroad was ASCII Microsoft in Japan, born of a 1977 agreement with Kazuhiko Nishi's ASCII Magazine; Nishi went on to become Microsoft's vice-president for the Far East.

Which hardware product, released in 1983 with its new publishing arm, was one of Microsoft's first non-software items?

The mouse arrived two years before Windows 1.0 gave people much reason to use one.

Which security firm's faulty update caused the July 2024 global Windows outage?

A defective CrowdStrike Falcon sensor update on July 19, 2024 crashed about 8.5 million Windows machines; its CEO stressed it was not a cyberattack, but flights, payments and hospitals were disrupted for days.

Which company did Microsoft license its first browser from to create Internet Explorer?

Spyglass later disputed the deal: it was owed a royalty per copy sold, but Microsoft never sold a copy, bundling the browser free with Windows.

What was the codename of Windows Vista during its early development?

Vista was developed as Longhorn for more than five years, including a 2004 reset; it reached consumers on January 30, 2007, and was criticised for the horsepower its Aero theme and desktop gadgets demanded.

Microsoft's short-lived Kin phones of 2010 grew out of its 2008 purchase of which company?

Danger Incorporated, maker of the T-Mobile Sidekick, was bought in February 2008 and its team built the Kin; the phones went on sale on May 14, 2010 and were discontinued within two months because of poor sales.

Which speech-recognition company did Microsoft agree to buy for about $16 billion in 2021?

Nuance Communications, whose Dragon dictation software is widely used in hospitals, was bought for about $16 billion (nearly $20 billion with debt) in a deal that closed in March 2022.

How many units did the original Xbox sell, beating the GameCube but trailing the PS2?

The original Xbox sold about 24 million units, against 155 million for the PS2 and 21 million for the GameCube; the Xbox 360 later reached 84 million but was edged by the PS3's 87 million.

Which 1983 home computer standard did Microsoft and ASCII Corporation create with numerous hardware partners?

MSX, devised by Microsoft and Kazuhiko Nishi's ASCII in 1983 and built by Sony, Panasonic, Philips and others, ran MSX-DOS; the machines sold well in Asia, Europe and South America while IBM PC clones took the US.

Which judge ordered Microsoft split in two in June 2000 in the US antitrust case?

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft split into an operating-system company and an applications company on June 7, 2000; an appeals court overturned the breakup the next year and a settlement was approved in 2002.

Which comedian was paid $10 million to appear alongside Bill Gates in Microsoft's 2008 television adverts for Windows?

Jerry Seinfeld's adverts were dropped from television within weeks, when Microsoft switched to a different campaign and kept the longer cuts for its website.

Which wrestler joined Bill Gates on stage in Las Vegas to unveil the original Xbox console at CES?

The Rock made a surprise appearance during Gates's keynote speech, ten months before the console reached the shops.

Which computer giant first approached Microsoft in July 1980 about software for its planned personal computer?

IBM came calling shortly after Bill Gates's mother joined a United Way board alongside John Opel, the IBM president who became its chief executive months later. The operating system Microsoft supplied became MS-DOS.

What did a Belgian prankster's gang pelt Bill Gates with when they ambushed him in Brussels in 1998?

Pies were Noël Godin's trademark, and his group drank Trappist beer for courage before the ambush. A year earlier the gang had pied the future French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Which ambient music pioneer composed the six-second startup sound that greeted users of Windows 95?

Brian Eno made 84 tiny pieces for the job, and later admitted he wrote the chosen one on a Mac, having never used a PC in his life.

Microsoft paid $240 million in 2007 for a 1.6% stake in which young social network?

Facebook was valued at around $15 billion by the deal, at a time when the site was not yet four years old.

Which web portal turned down Microsoft's unsolicited $44.6 billion takeover offer in 2008?

Yahoo held out for more even after Microsoft raised its bid to $47 billion. Eight years later it agreed to sell its core business to Verizon for about a tenth of that.

Which three-key Windows login shortcut did Bill Gates call a mistake in 2013, saying he had wanted a single button?

Ctrl+Alt+Delete was devised by engineer David Bradley in a few minutes, as a quick way to restart a PC during development.

Which travel booking site was launched inside Microsoft in October 1996 before being floated as a separate company?

Expedia's shares were priced at $14 for the 1999 flotation, opened at $37 and ended their first day above $53, almost four times the offer price.

Microsoft signed a 20-year deal in 2024 to buy all the power from which mothballed American nuclear plant?

Three Mile Island's Unit 1, shut in 2019 after years of losses, is the reactor the deal revives. It stood beside the one that partly melted down in 1979, America's worst commercial nuclear accident.

Microsoft Teams was unveiled in November 2016 as a direct competitor to which workplace chat app?

Slack answered with a full-page newspaper advert welcoming the competition. Months earlier Microsoft had weighed a multibillion-dollar bid for the company.

Which name did Microsoft give the search engine that replaced Live Search in 2009, after testing it internally as Kumo?

Bing was announced by Steve Ballmer at a conference in San Diego; the test name it shed came from a word meaning both spider and cloud.

Which browser, codenamed Spartan during development, replaced Internet Explorer as the default in Windows in 2015?

Edge was later rebuilt on Chromium, the open-source project that also underpins Google Chrome, which let Microsoft bring its browser to Macs.

Microsoft's voice assistant, launched in 2014 with actress Jen Taylor as its American voice, went by which name?

Cortana was named after an artificial intelligence character from Microsoft's own games, voiced by the same actress. In 2014 it correctly called the first 14 knockout matches of the football World Cup.

Which background colour gave the infamous Windows crash screen its nickname, before a 2025 redesign turned it black?

Blue arrived with Windows 3.1, which changed the error screen from black, so the 2025 redesign took the dreaded message back to where it started.

Which Microsoft console's 'Red Ring of Death' hardware failures cost the company $1.15 billion in repairs?

Xbox 360 owners were given a three-year warranty in July 2007, in an open letter admitting the console's problems; the nickname echoed the Windows crash screen.

Which webmail service did Microsoft buy in 1997 for a reported $400 million and later rebrand as Outlook.com?

Hotmail was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and had been running for less than two years when Microsoft bought it.

Which CD-ROM encyclopedia did Microsoft publish from 1993 to 2009, after Britannica turned down a partnership?

Encarta was built instead on the text of the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia, under the internal codename Gandalf.

The US government's 1998 antitrust case accused Microsoft of using Windows to squeeze out which rival browser maker?

Netscape saw its share of the browser market fall from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to under one percent by 2006.

Microsoft went public in March 1986 at $21 a share on which stock exchange, where it trades as MSFT?

Nasdaq was a fully electronic market, and the flotation there raised $61 million for a company not yet eleven years old.

Which 2012 version of Windows dropped the taskbar's signature menu button, then restored it a year later?

Windows 8 dropped the button because its designers saw the desktop as just another app, not the heart of the system; complaints brought it back in the 8.1 update.

Which mobile puzzle hit from the studio King became a Microsoft property through the company's record 2023 takeover?

Candy Crush had earned more than $20 billion by 2023, and its maker King had itself been bought for $5.9 billion seven years before Microsoft's deal.

Microsoft held talks in 2020 to buy part of which video app, a deal that fell through that September?

TikTok, then facing a threatened US ban, was under pressure to sell its American operations. It ended the courtship by choosing Oracle as its trusted technology partner instead, and no sale to Microsoft took place.

Which name did Microsoft settle on during 2023 for the AI chatbot it was building into Windows and Office?

Copilot started that February under a different name, as a chat feature inside Microsoft's search engine, before the brand spread across the company's products.

Which Microsoft game series, first sold in 1982, is the company's longest-running software line, older than Windows?

Flight Simulator was licensed from Bruce Artwick's company Sublogic, which had already released versions for other home computers.

Which typeface became the default in Microsoft Office in 2007 and held the job for 17 years until Aptos replaced it?

Calibri was drawn by Lucas de Groot, who described its subtly rounded letters as having a warm and soft character.

Satya Nadella, who became Microsoft's third chief executive in 2014, was born in which Indian city?

Hyderabad is where Nadella went to school before an engineering degree in Karnataka. India later gave him the Padma Bhushan, its third-highest civilian award.

Which Xbox feature, introduced with the 2005 console, awards points that add up to a player's Gamerscore?

Achievements were the first easily accessible reward system to span every game on a console, and Sony followed three years later with Trophies.

Which Microsoft 365 app lets users build surveys and quizzes that are marked automatically?

Forms was launched in June 2016 as a tool for teachers in Office 365 Education, who could set a quiz and have every pupil's score worked out for them.

Which workplace social network did Microsoft buy in 2012 for $1.2 billion and later fold into Viva Engage?

Yammer let colleagues join a private network simply by holding an email address at their employer's domain; the name was phased out during 2023.

Plugging in which device crashed Windows 98 during a live demonstration with Bill Gates on stage at COMDEX?

A scanner did the damage, to cheers from the audience. The assistant who plugged it in, Chris Capossela, stayed on and later became Microsoft's chief marketing officer.

In October 2003 Microsoft began bundling its security fixes into one monthly release on which day of the week?

Tuesday was chosen, the second of each month, to cut the cost of patching after the Blaster worm. The day after soon earned the nickname Exploit Wednesday.

Microsoft's Project Natick, tested off Scotland's Orkney Islands from 2018, sank what beneath the sea for two years?

A data centre holding 864 servers ran reliably down there, cooled by sea water at its natural temperature, and was put to work on vaccine research during the pandemic.

Microsoft renamed its online storage service OneDrive after losing a 2013 trademark case to which British broadcaster?

Sky objected to the service's original name, SkyDrive, and the High Court agreed that it breached the broadcaster's trademark.

Which publisher of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout joined Xbox when Microsoft bought its parent company ZeniMax Media?

Bethesda's parent also owned id Software, so the 2021 deal put Doom and Quake under the same roof as Xbox.

Which British studio behind GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie did Microsoft buy in 2002, ending its Nintendo partnership?

Rare had been 49 percent owned by Nintendo, for which it made Donkey Kong Country; under Microsoft it went on to build the pirate game Sea of Thieves.

Which Microsoft language, released in 2012, is a superset of JavaScript that compiles back into it?

TypeScript adds optional type checking so that mistakes are caught before a program runs, then a compiler turns the files into plain JavaScript.

Who worked on Microsoft's first CD-ROM titles, took charge of Xbox in 2014 and later ran Microsoft Gaming?

Phil Spencer had joined the company in 1988 and stayed for more than three decades, becoming chief executive of Microsoft Gaming in 2022.

Which Xbox racing series was created as a rival to PlayStation's Gran Turismo and later added open-world Horizon games?

Forza splits in two: the Motorsport games are track simulations, while the Horizon spin-offs by British studio Playground Games are set around a roaming music and racing festival.

Which former Microsoft technology chief, the founder of Microsoft Research, later wrote the cookbook Modernist Cuisine?

Nathan Myhrvold took leave from the job to earn a culinary diploma in France, and his cookbook was later named the James Beard Foundation's cookbook of the year.

Dave Cutler, lead designer of Windows NT, joined Microsoft in 1988 from which minicomputer maker, where he built VMS?

Digital Equipment had cancelled the processor project Cutler was leading, and a group of its developers followed him to Microsoft. One tale says the letters WNT are VMS with each moved on by one.

Which name did Microsoft plan to give Windows before marketing chief Rowland Hanson argued against it?

Interface Manager lost out when Hanson, recruited from the skincare firm Neutrogena for his branding skills, persuaded the company that Windows would sell better.

Which American city lent its name to the internal codename for Windows 95 during its development?

Chicago was not the last place name on the list: the follow-up, Windows 98, began its development under the codename Memphis.

Which spreadsheet did Microsoft launch in 1982 to take on VisiCalc, before replacing it with Excel?

Multiplan sold over a million copies but could not catch Lotus 1-2-3, so Microsoft conceded the text-based market and bet on graphical spreadsheets instead.

Which founder of Microsoft's applications group, the team behind Excel, later paid for two trips to the space station?

Charles Simonyi, who was born in Budapest and left Hungary at 17, flew to the station aboard Russian Soyuz craft in 2007 and again in 2009.

Which Microsoft programming language, unveiled in 2000, was developed as COOL until trademark worries forced a new name?

C# started out as COOL, short for C-like Object Oriented Language, and its lead designer Anders Hejlsberg had earlier worked on Turbo Pascal.

Bill Gates's 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' accused most home computer owners of doing what with Microsoft's BASIC?

Using it without paying was the charge: Gates claimed that more than nine in ten users had never bought their copy, and warned that nobody could write good software for nothing.

Which typeface, used for menu and dialog text across Windows, was also chosen for the Microsoft logo unveiled in 2012?

Segoe was designed by Steve Matteson at Monotype, and the German foundry Linotype protested that it looked too much like its own Frutiger family.

Microsoft's first offer to the teenager behind MikeRoweSoft.com in 2004 covered only which of his costs?

His registration fee came to just $10, an offer that so annoyed the 17-year-old Canadian that he asked for $10,000. He settled for an Xbox and a family trip to Microsoft's headquarters.

Which Sega console could run games built on a custom version of Microsoft's Windows CE, to make PC ports easier?

Dreamcast programmers ended up favouring Sega's own development tools over the ones Microsoft supplied to make porting easy.