Auditor’s Guide to Information Systems Auditing

Chapter 34. Auditing Windows

The phenomenal success of Windows from the time of the release of Version 3.0 surprised many people. The success did not surprise the engineers and evangelists at Microsoft, who had praised Windows since the beginning, and it did not surprise users who had preferred the benefits of a graphical interface, multitasking, and connectivity between applications for years. As a result, Windows has steadily become the operating system of choice in the corporate environment.

History

In 1981, IBM introduced to the marketplace the IBM PC based on the Intel 8088 chip. This PC arrived bundled with a 16-bit, single-user, command-line operating system called PC-DOS 1.0. The operating system was produced by a relatively new company called Microsoft, better known for its BASIC interpreter. The operating system was based around a functionality of the much smaller operating system, CP/M, which had been used on home computers prior to that date. Microsoft also introduced its own proprietary version of the operating system, which was known as MS-DOS.

In 1983, Microsoft released the more powerful MS-DOS version 2, which contained a number of more powerful features derived from UNIX. In 1986 MS-DOS 3.0 was produced to coincide with the introduction of the new IBM PC/AT, but DOS continued to be a single-user, command-line-oriented operating system.

In 1990, partially in response to the graphical user interfaces utilized in Apple computers, Microsoft released a graphical shell called ...