PowerShell turned 18 years old!

Yesterday, November 14th, 2024, PowerShell turned 18 years old. 🙂 I started using it after the first public beta version (“Monad”) in 2005, and I was immediately hooked! In this blog post, I will discuss the session I attended yesterday, where we celebrated PowerShell’s 18th birthday and my personal PowerShell history.

18 years, that long?

Yes, quite sometime now, considering most people started at PowerShell 5, I guess 🙂 PowerShell v1 was there initially, but it became more standard when v2 was shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. From there, it evolved to v5.1, still standard installed on Windows, and from the Open Source Multi-Platform PowerShell v6 (Core) to the current v7.

For more detailed information and history, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerShell.

Personal experience

As I mentioned, I started with Monad (Pre-v1) and liked the concept! Command-Line is how I can do many things, such as Cisco/Linux, etc., which was much more potent than standard GUI and clicking around.

My first WOW moment, which I also mention in the video below, was when I was working on log parsing with batch/cmd scripts, which took me weeks to finish. I started doing that with PowerShell, and in minutes, I had more progress than I did using my existing “oldskool” scripts 🙂

I followed all the news and used all the newer versions after that straight away, and colleagues always said that my motto was: “A day without PowerShell is a day wasted.” 🙂

I liked the open source and multi-platform approach for PowerShell and many other multi-platform changes from Microsoft, which made it grow so much faster. You can use it anywhere, making scripts portable and reusable, and that’s always a win.

I started blogging about it, too, and that’s the reason for this site, of course. I wanted to share my experiences and learn from others; being a PowerShell advocate gave me the Microsoft MVP award in the PowerShell category!

The 18th birthday livestream

Heiko Brenn, from ScriptRunner, organized a livestream yesterday with the following PowerShell people:

• Aleksander Nikolic (Azure MVP, co-founder of PowerShellMagazine)
• Bruce Payette (Founding member of the PowerShell team, creator of PowerShell DSC)
• Bruno Buyck (Founder of the Trouble Shooter company, specializes in PowerShell automation)
• Chrissy LeMaire (SQL and PowerShell MVP, creator of DBATools)
• Damien Scoles (Microsoft MVP 365, blogs at powershellgeek, and author of 5 books)
• Guy Leech (Microsoft MVP, Consultant, inventor of AppSense Application Manager)
• Jeff Hicks (Multi-Year Microsoft MVP, PowerShell author, teacher)
• Matthew Dowst (Microsoft MVP PowerShell and Azure Hybrid&Migration, author)

And me 🙂 It was so much fun being in the session with these people. We all shared our personal experiences and heard insights from Bruce about how it all started. We learned that we all had similar experiences during the first few PowerShell versions. We all started with Quest PowerShell tools, had Active Directory and Exchange to run the first things PowerShell commands against, etc. Check it out below!

Wrapping up

18 years flew by; I am curious about the newer versions and how they evolve even further! Have a lovely weekend!