In early days Microsoft had the legacy Command.com and cmd.exe as the shell access to administer Windows. They had their shortcomings, it didn’t give full capability to do everything from the cmd prompt which was allowed from the GUI . Later Microsoft introduced WSH with cscript.exe . This allowed much more flexibility for SA to administer systems. This integrated with Active Script Engine and allowed scripting in Jscript, Vbscript.

By 2002 Microsoft had started to develop a new approach to command line management, including a shell called Monad (aka Microsoft Shell or MSH) . This was released as Microsoft Powershell.

• Microsoft defines it as “A task automation framework consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on top of, and integrated with the .NET Framework”
• It has full access to WMI and Windows COM objects.
• Very similar to Unix/Linux Bourne Shell. In fact most of the Unix commands are made available as alias in Powershell.
• In-built in Windows 2008 Server and Windows 7 versions. Separate install for Windows 2003 Server and XP Operating System.

I have just started with Powershell... So You may see few more post on this in the upcoming days.