A brief history of PowerShell

Before PowerShell, systems and network administrators managing Microsoft software stacks had to resort to using different tools, languages, and technologies to enable automation and integration tasks. For some tasks, administrators used batch files that could be run using Command Prompt (or DOS Shell, for those of you who still remember this term). For other tasks, maybe Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) was used. Yet, for additional tasks, maybe Windows Scripting Host (WSH) was used. The list goes on.

In a lot of ways, administrators had to be creative because there was not one single language and tool they could use to bridge different Microsoft (and non-Microsoft) tasks together. Unix and Linux administrators, on the other hand, always had C-shell and trusty bash to rely on. At that time, Microsoft just did not have that powerful a command-line tool.

Enter PowerShell. PowerShell was born out of this need for integration and automation. Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PowerShell, initially incubated PowerShell under the project named Monad. He originally described Monad as the next generation platform for automation.

Note

You can read the Monad Manifesto written by Jeffrey Snover in 2002 at http://www.jsnover.com/Docs/MonadManifesto.pdf.

More than 10 years after this manifesto was written, PowerShell has already improved and matured in leaps and bounds and has indeed become the platform for automation and integration for Microsoft products (and even non-Microsoft packages).

As of today, many Microsoft products have adopted PowerShell and delivered numerous cmdlets (we will talk about them later) with their respective product installations. Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server are products that support PowerShell (to different extents), but the support has widened through the years.