How a $50,000 clone of CP/M rode the IBM PC deal into the most valuable monopoly in software history, fought the 640K barrier for a decade, papered DOS over with a graphical shell, unified consumers and engineers on Windows 95, ran two completely different operating systems in parallel for years, and finally collapsed them into a single NT kernel whose Win32 ABI Microsoft has refused to break for thirty years.
Windows
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The Story of MS-DOS and Windows -
How a Modern Window Is Engineered A window looks like a sheet of glass in a frame, but a modern insulated glazing unit is a precision thermal device: stacked panes, a sealed cavity of heavy inert gas, and a coating of sputtered silver a few atoms thick that reflects heat while passing light. The layered construction, what low-E and emissivity actually mean, how to read an NFRC label honestly, and why triple pane is sometimes a trap.
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Active Directory Domain Services Fundamentals The backbone of enterprise identity, explained for the Linux admin: domains, trees, and forests; organizational units and delegation; the tight dependency on DNS; the global catalog and FSMO roles; replication topology and sites; accounts and groups and the security implications of nesting; and standing up a domain controller from scratch. How AD actually models an organization, what is new in Windows Server 2025, and where it bites you.
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Group Policy in Practice The configuration-management system every Windows shop lives on, explained for the Linux admin: GPOs and how they are processed (LSDOU and precedence), computer versus user policy, security baselines and ADMX administrative templates, loopback processing, mapped drives and login scripts, WMI filtering, and troubleshooting with gpresult and the Resultant Set of Policy. The good, the bad, the sprawl, and where it overlaps with modern Intune/MDM.
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Kerberos and Windows Authentication How sign-on actually works in an Active Directory world: NTLM and why it persists, Kerberos tickets (the TGT, service tickets, and the KDC), SPNs and delegation (unconstrained, constrained, and resource-based), and the attacks every defender should recognize — Kerberoasting, pass-the-hash, pass-the-ticket, and golden and silver tickets. A clear walk through the protocol and its real-world abuse, plus what Windows Server 2025 changes.
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PowerShell for Administrators The automation language Windows admins cannot avoid, for engineers fluent in bash: the object pipeline and why it beats text streams, cmdlet naming and discovery, remoting with WinRM and SSH, working with Active Directory and the registry, modules and the gallery, error handling and scripting patterns, and PowerShell on Linux. A pragmatic onramp that respects what you already know from the shell.
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.NET Framework 4.8 + IIS + SQL Server: A Modern Development and Deployment Workflow for Legacy Apps A practical, end-to-end guide to working productively on a .NET Framework 4.8 / IIS / SQL Server app in 2026 — workstation setup, isolated local development with Docker Windows containers, per-developer databases, web.config transforms, build pipelines, Web Deploy / Octopus deployment patterns, and the realistic modernization on-ramp.