Wired on Friday: For the past month, Microsoft has been touting its new version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, to an audience of third-party programmers.

For a product whose development has barely begun, and will only ship in 2005 at the earliest, the company has been drowning its audience of coders in tantalising nuggets of information and hype. It's too early to sell Longhorn to businesses and the home; but Microsoft really wants programmers to like it.

Ploughing through the speeches and fact sheets produced by the Redmond company, my eye was drawn to one particular, almost throwaway announcement. To crowds of eager Windows coders at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, Mr Chris Anderson, a leading Microsoft programmer, announced: "The C# compiler is now included in the default Windows client installation."

That little sentence got a round of applause from the audience. Of course, to the rest of us, it's near gobbledegook.

The sentence certainly needs a little unpacking. The "Windows client" is what Microsoft now calls the consumer version of Windows. "C#" (pronounced C sharp) is the new programming language Microsoft is encouraging code writers to learn and use. And a compiler is the program that grabs the words written by such coders, and converts them into a form that computers can execute.

In a nutshell, the next version of Windows will allow anyone to program Windows.

Not easily, mind. That sentence was gobbledegook for a reason. C# is by no means a user-friendly, drag-and-click way to code programs. Its compiler is a programmers' program. The writing it converts is that same heady brew of odd symbols and quasi-mathematics that have remained the incomprehensible core of the technological priesthood's incantations for decades. What ever this free utility is, it is not Minesweeper. It is not something your grandmother will use.

So why include it free in every new Windows installation? Why indeed, particularly as, for more than a decade, Microsoft has been selling such programs to commercial programmers for hundreds of dollars?

Since the first version of Windows, coders wishing to develop on the Microsoft platform have had to splash out on expensive development systems. Their money, on the whole, has gone to Microsoft.

This was one of the coups of Microsoft's switch from DOS to Windows in the early 1990s. On Windows's predecessor, DOS, what few tools you needed to develop programs were either free or dirt cheap.

If you had DOS - which, like Windows, everybody did - you could write a program for DOS. A program that might turn out to be as good as anything Microsoft or its competitors could craft.

This was important because, in the early days of microcomputing, small entrepreneurs and hobbyists, dabbling with their single purchased PCs, were the only figures brave enough to experiment with selling software on these strange home computers.

By the time the 1990s had rolled around, this was no longer true, but the first generation of successful PC software companies - including Microsoft - emerged from such small beginnings, and remembered their roots. This was the legacy that let anyone code in DOS.

After Windows, you had to pay to create software that ran on Microsoft's platform. Not much, in business terms, to be sure - a few hundred dollars. And certainly nothing like the potential return you could receive as a commercial programmer working on the world's most popular platform.

But for the hobbyists and casual programmers, it was the end of an era. There were computer owners and computer programmers. And if you couldn't justify the money spent on professional programming software, you had no way of creating your own software.

The same was true with Microsoft's competitor, Apple. The move from the Apple II to the Macintosh also spelt the end of cheap ways to create programs.

But in the past few years, Apple's approach has changed. Since the first version of Mac OS X was released two years ago, the company has provided a free development system for any budding Mac owner wishing to write their own code.

You could download it from its website, or install it from the extra CD included in the purchase of the operating system. There was no charge in either case.

To a certain extent, that's merely indicative of Mac OS X's ancestry. OS X is a Unix derivative. And Unixes have historically been very programmer-friendly - often to the detriment of their friendliness to anyone else. Unix installations generally drip with software to write programs.

But Apple's offer of free programming tools has been more than just a nod to the traditions of its platform. With its tiny fraction of the market, Apple desperately needs third-party developers.

By providing the tools to create software at no cost, Apple has removed one important hurdle. Anyone who gets the yearning to write programs for Apple hardware - even just as a hobby - can.

Whether it was the free tools that did it, something worked.

From an operating system with a mere handful of developers, Mac OS X has already spawned a rich cottage industry of one-man hobbyist (or small business developers), producing more than 6,000 packages for the OS.

It's nothing like the leagues of big corporations that drive Windows software. But, like the early days of DOS, it's enough. Hobbyists help, if only to give the appearance of thousands of applications.

Just how well the hobbyist wing can serve an operating system is exemplified by Linux. Linux is, famously, entirely written by amateurs pursuing their unpaid hobby. And, notably, the genesis of Linux occurred in the early 1990s - just as Microsoft was upping the costs to writing code on its platforms.

Microsoft advanced from DOS to Windows, but left its hobbyist programmers behind. Starved of a decent way to write their own programs on their own computers, the first Linux hobbyists had to invent their own operating system just to continue their experimentation.

A decade later, that spare time doodling has come up with a system that competes with Windows in a number of key markets.

Microsoft need not fear Linux or Apple stealing its markets. But it can worry about it stealing away the next generation of small, enthusiastic developers.

Somewhere in Redmond, it remembers the history of its own industry, and knows that's a bad omen.

And so, for the next generation, it'll include a little gift of gobbledegook in the Windows Client - and perhaps keep hold of the next generation of impoverished innovators who might otherwise look elsewhere.