The birth of PowerShell

I. Introduction

The first version of PowerShell based on the .NET Framework was officially released on November 14, 2006! Prior to this, development work was carried out as part of a project called Monad, in reference to the book Monadology written by the German philosopher Leibniz. Let's take a look at the birth of PowerShell...

II. Once upon a time, there was PowerShell

Once upon a time, in the Microsoft labs, a team of developers was working on a project codenamed "Monad". The year was 2003, and at the time, Windows-based system administrators had to make do with batch scripts, Command Prompt and VScript to automate their tasks. Meanwhile, Linux users boasted of their powerful command-line shells, but Microsoft wanted to bring something similar to the Windows world.

The Monad project evolved into what we know today as PowerShell. PowerShell was officially introduced to the public in 2006, and introduced essential features for task automation and routine system administration that had previously been missing from Windows. PowerShell is now available to system administrators, who can use it to write scripts to manage Windows Server servers and a range of services.

The PowerShell story doesn't end there. In 2016, Microsoft announced that PowerShell would become an open source project and would be available for Linux and MacOS, thanks in particular to the use of the .NET Core framework. This was a very important step in the history of PowerShell, as it broadened its audience and enabled the language to be used on systems other than Windows.

Today, PowerShell is widely used all over the world by system administrators, developers, etc. to automate a wide variety of tasks, and to administer servers, workstations and Cloud resources.

Over the years, it seems that PowerShell users have become true automation wizards, writing ever more elaborate scripts. As in all fairy tales, they lived happily ever after, filled with scripts that enabled them to be more efficient on a daily basis. Although PowerShell has come a long way since its beginnings as a Monad project, the story isn't over yet: in the world of technology, there's always something new and evolving. Thus, Microsoft developers continue to work on new features and enhancements to make PowerShell even more powerful and useful for its large community of users. Indeed, the members of this community play a key role, sharing numerous scripts and ready-to-use modules to complement the work done by Microsoft. And so the never-ending story of PowerShell continues...