The world of software development  is all about milestones. At the lowest level, a programmer has to create a certain set of functions in a fixed amount of time, and is then judged on this performance. Companies bet millions of dollars that they will hit their project milestones and ship their products on time. The very concept of "Internet time" suggested that milestones were compressed. Technically, though, the milestones themselves would always be the same distance apart, hence the word "milestone." It's the speed at which people get to each milestone that's at issue.

MSDN Magazine is approaching its own important milestone. The issue that you hold today, Volume 20 Number 1, marks our 20th anniversary year—we gave birth to Microsoft Systems Journal in 1986.

A lot has changed in the past two decades. Just to give you an idea of how far we've come, let's look back on those golden days of the first MSJ. In 1986, we were covering the latest trends for developers: the new DDE protocol, the latest programmable graphics processors, and a dialog editor for Windows 1.0. Aldus was moving PageMaker to Windows, TSR development was becoming standardized, CodeView was the hot new debugging tool, and XENIX ran on the new Intel 803 chip.

Even more exciting was the news in 1986 that IBM was producing the first PC based on the Intel 80286 chip. It had enough horsepower to run VisiCalc, or WordStar, or whatever it was people did in offices back in the days before solitaire and instant messaging.

Today, of course, we're benefiting from 20 years of technological advances that have given us a world of computing that would have been unimaginable even in the mid-1980s. Multiprocessor machines can fit under your desk. You can run SQL Server on a three- pound laptop. You can take crummy photos with your cell phone and send them anywhere you like for only 25 cents a shot. Advances in graphics processing allow you to play Ms. Pac-Man on your home PC instead of relegating it to just a few high-end arcades and bus stations.

But even though we have incredible computing power at our fingertips, we face new challenges. In 1986, you had to look at every line of code to make sure your program's performance didn't take down your PC. Today, there's little chance that a perf bug would have that big an effect, but so many things can run simultaneously that performance is still an issue that separates good programmers from great ones.

Other things we care about have changed as well. The Internet has grown from 10,000 hosts to about 200 million hosts—who can keep track anymore? Almost every person in the U.S. has access to the Internet, and the numbers worldwide are growing apace. When you step back and look at where we started, and how far we've come, it's an awesome thing. (And this is one of the few times when the word "awesome" is actually appropriate.)

The more we look back at the year of our publication's birth, the more clearly we can see the evolution. Back in 1986, the Fox Network had just launched. "Diff'rent Strokes" was ending its triumphant eight-year run. The Olsen twins were helpless toddlers, and the Red Sox were losing yet another heartbreaker of a World Series. Today, Fox is the unparalleled voice of cheesy reality shows, "Diff'rent Strokes" lives on only in our fond memories, the Olsen twins are America's sweethearts, and the Red Sox again lost a heartbreaker of a...what? They actually won something?

This year, we'll have more celebration of our 20th year serving you. We couldn't have made it this far without your loyal support, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for making us the great magazine we've become.

Thanks to  the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Shawn Burke, Shawn Farkas, Matthew Gibbs, Jim Hogg, Rick James, Atsushi Kanamori, Michael Kaplan, Shon Katzenberger, Jonathan Keljo, Gerrard Lindsay, Eilon Lipton, Rico Mariani, Adam Nathan, Erik Olson, Joel Pobar, Anil Ruia, Anson Tsao, and Maura Van Der Linden.