IT Insights Blog — Microsoft

Halloween began as a celebration of the western Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day. It was a time of year dedicated to the remembering of the dead, especially saints, martyrs and other departed faithful. Over the years, pagan influences built upon the religious foundation of All Hallows’ Day, leading to the modern-day Halloween celebration.

Some activities in society are restricted by age. For example, in the United States you have to be 18 or 19 in most states to purchase tobacco products, and at least that old in many states to legally use them. (There’s no age restriction at all for legal use in a number of states, whereas California and Hawaii have a minimum smoking age of 21.) The legal voting age in every U.S. state is 18. And you have to be at least 16 in every U.S. state but four (Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and South Carolina) to legally operate a vehicle.

On April 4, 1975, two men in Albuquerque, N.M, ventured into a fairly new market with some new ideas and founded what was at the time a language software development company. That company would one day become one of the largest, most influential companies in the world, showcasing the now ubiquitous name of Microsoft. Bill Gates and Paul Allen couldn’t have known how successful their venture would become when it all began. Now, not only is Microsoft continually distributing best-selling products like the Xbox, Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Windows operating system, but the company is training the next generation of IT professionals with its unique certifications.

From its intimidating preponderance of acronyms to the ever-expanding terminology of memory capacity — gigabyte, terabyte, exabyte, petabyte — information technology has numerous amusing quirks of language. For example, PC hardware is one of the few realms where it's still acceptable to mingle the terms "master" and "slave" in describing the relationship between separate and unequal components of a system.

It wouldn’t take long for a newcomer to the internet (someone who’d been living in a cave since, oh, 2008 or so) to recognize that web users have a serious obsession with lists. What are the “17 Food Questions You Didn’t Know You Needed an Answer To,” for example, or the “Top 10 Most Venomous Snakes”? Don’t you sort of with that you knew “14 Things Every Book Nerd Can Relate to on Valentine’s Day,” or that you could brag to your buddies about your “inside” knowledge of the “10 Tales from the Production of the Original Star Wars”? The list of lists goes on and on, and increases on an hourly basis. Most of these lists will provide a reader with a nice, “Huh, that’s interesting” moment of truth and trivia, but the information is far from life changing. There is one list however that could change the course of your career: The Certification Magazine Salary Survey 75.