A little bit of Microsoft Access History

We've been talking a lot about Microsoft Access in these blog posts; however we've never really delved into some of the interesting history of Microsoft Access. Now, this isn't required knowledge by Access Database Developers and Consultants to actually use the software, but history is always important and interesting. This is especially true when compared and contrasted to the present.

The very first version of MS Access was released in November of 1992, which is just over 20 years ago this indicative of exactly how useful databases are, 20 years on and they are still an amazing tool. One of the most amazing aspects I believe is that, version 2.0 of MS Access has the minimum specified requirements of “Microsoft Windows v3.1 with 4 MB of RAM required, 6 MB RAM recommended; 8 MB of available hard disk space required, 14 MB hard disk space recommended. The product shipped on seven 1.44 MB diskettes.” This is highly contrasted with the soon to be released MS Office 2013 suite which has minimum system specs requiring at least a one gigahertz or faster CPU, 1GB of RAM and Graphics hardware acceleration and I’m sure it only comes on one DVD.

If this doesn't show how far we've computing has evolved throughout the years, I’m not sure what will. A few other little factoids, I find slightly entertaining are the fact, that the version number of MS Access skipped from 2.0 to 7.0 due to being bundled with the MS Word which was at version 7.0 already. On this note, the developers also skipped the version 13.0 due to the superstition associated with the number.

In the end, the history of MS Access is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things for MS Access Database Developers and Consultants however history is excellent at teaching lessons and shouldn't be ignored. Of course for a far more comprehensive look at the history of MS Access, the Wikipedia page is always good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Access#History.