Real, dated releases and announcements — verified against official sources, not speculation.
On December 31, 2001, Microsoft stopped supporting and patching MS-DOS 6.22 and older versions — though DOS embedded within Windows 95/98/Me lingered in support for years afterward.
Announced October 28, 2018 and closed July 9, 2019, IBM's purchase of Red Hat was the largest software acquisition in history at the time — and a direct bet on hybrid cloud built around Linux and open source.
Launched January 6, 2011 with over 1,000 apps, the Mac App Store brought one-click purchase, download, and install to the Mac — and logged a million downloads within its first 24 hours.
Released July 29, 2015 as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8.1 users, Windows 10 reached over 75 million devices within a month — a deliberate bet on rapid adoption over per-copy revenue.
Accepted as an incubating CNCF project on March 29, 2017, containerd split out the core container-runtime functionality from Docker itself — becoming the shared runtime foundation much of the ecosystem, including Kubernetes, later standardized on.
On June 29, 1994, a Usenet post to comp.os.msdos.apps proposing a public-domain DOS kicked off what would be renamed Free-DOS weeks later — a direct response to Microsoft's plans to fold MS-DOS into Windows 95.
Released December 17, 2003, the 2.6 series brought in-kernel preemption, NPTL threading, SELinux, and support for far larger process/user counts — the foundation the kernel built the next two decades on.
Released as a public beta on April 5, 2006, Boot Camp let Intel-based Macs dual-boot Windows XP just months after Apple's architecture transition began — a striking bet on cross-platform flexibility.
Released to manufacturing July 22, 2009 and to the public October 22, 2009, Windows 7 refined Vista's foundations into a release widely regarded as one of Microsoft's most successful, eventually selling over 630 million copies.
Announced January 20, 2014, FreeBSD 10.0 replaced GCC with Clang/LLVM as the default system compiler on major architectures and debuted bhyve, the project's native hypervisor.