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Happy 30th Birthday, Windows! 249

v3rgEz writes: And what a ride it's been. Today marks the 30th anniversary since the debut of Windows 1.01, the first commercial release of Windows. At the time, it was derided as being slow, buggy, and clunky, but since then ... Well, it looks a lot better. .The Verge has a pictorial history of Windows through the years. What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?
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Happy 30th Birthday, Windows!

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  • by Enesim ( 2803413 ) on Friday November 20, 2015 @06:58PM (#50972733)

    What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?

    Olympic fail - Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird's Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting
    http://www.gizmodo.com/5035456... [gizmodo.com]

    • What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?

      The Olympic one is excellent, though I'd also have to go for the classic demo of Windows 98 which actually had Bill Gates standing right there when it happened [youtube.com].

      Bill: "... That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet..."

      Absolutely, Bill. Absolutely.

      Unfortunately... you did ship that (though 98 wasn't that bad). But then Windows ME. And then Vista. And then Windows 8. You keep doing it.

  • by YukariHirai ( 2674609 ) on Friday November 20, 2015 @07:13PM (#50972837)
    There's now a wider variety of reasons Windows is derided.
  • Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday November 20, 2015 @07:21PM (#50972869) Homepage Journal

    Now Windows is too old to get a job in IT.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Friday November 20, 2015 @07:26PM (#50972897)

    30 years of software releases and still no stable builds! how do they do it? ;)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, haha, funny and all but I haven't experienced a blue screen that wasn't hardware related since XP. I'm not saying they don't happen but it's not Windows 98 anymore. Every time somebody makes a comment like this it makes me think they used a computer once about 1996 and then never touched them again.

  • Don't diss it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20, 2015 @07:39PM (#50972951)

    Windows has a long and sordid history, with predatory business practices at the front of our minds, and there have been shithouse editions of Windows. But if I met the engineers and others who pulled together Windows 95, Windows XP or Windows 7 I would shake their hands as vigorously as I would those of a Linux kernel maintainer.

  • Has the rose in the palm of Windows' hand turned black now? Can we send it to Carousel and incinerate it? Please?
  • by n3r0.m4dski11z ( 447312 ) on Friday November 20, 2015 @07:42PM (#50972967) Homepage Journal

    I can never again hear 'start me up' by the rolling stones without cringing due to windows 95 memories and the many parodies of the song that followed. I have a similar experience with 'come together' which will forever be in my mind as "the nortel networks song".

    Marketing sure is sick. i can hear them both, plain as day, 20 years later!

  • by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Friday November 20, 2015 @07:49PM (#50972995)
    If you could go back in time and strangle Baby Windows, would you?
  • Well. Looks aren't everything you know.
  • Thirty years ago I was sure that Windows would never make it because it was so slow and cumbersome. [add slow and cumbersome jokes here.]
  • by mschuyler ( 197441 ) on Friday November 20, 2015 @09:28PM (#50973415) Homepage Journal

    I was an "official" journalist and my magazine got me and my spouse an invite to Redmond. We met at a Seattle hotel to be bused over. I was on the same bus as a very disgruntled John Dvorak. Jay Leno was the MC, making stupid jokes about "Bill's double-wide" while "Bill" kept making cutting comments over how much he paid Leno to be there. It was, as was usual for MS events, very well catered with crab and shrimp, and the day was absolutely beautiful for Seattle: Blue skies and fluffy white clouds EXACTLY like the Windows 95 box. I'm sure Bill ordered the day extra special.

    There was a small plane which circled the campus with a banner that said, "Windows 95 brought to you by Windows NT" At the end of the day they threw open a massive tent where everyone there was given an MS bag with a copy of Win95 in. My wife was ecstatic that she got a copy.

    And yeah, I get it. Linux, Linux, Linux, and the fact is I was dragged kicking and screaming into a GUI from the old DOS days, or even back to CP/M and dBase II. But Windows is a phenom, and that's a fact, too. My life in IT would never have been the same without it, and you haters need to get over it. Sorry for your loss.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So your fondest memory of Windows is being bribed to say nice things about it? And Windows is a "phenom" -- which means what, that it's an actual thing that actually happened? Please forgive me, I take back everything bad I ever said about it.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Yep. Windows 95 was good but no match for NT4, 2K, XP, 7, etc. Vista was OK. However, Windows fell apart with ME, 8, 10, etc. though. :(

  • I think Amiga Workbench 1.1 was around. It had plenty of bugs but was still pretty usable.

  • The MS-DOS and Windows PC entered the market as an affordable office workhorse, with strong software support from every major vendor.

    The OEM Windows system install became the gold standard for retail sales and support. The modular design of the PC meant that hardware advanced quickly --- and with Plug and Play configuration becoming the norm --- quite painlessly.

    Windows evolved into a capable operating system designed for users who share almost none of the geek's paranoia or obsessions with the internals o

  • Maybe we'll get lucky and Window's palm will start glowing red.

  • Many have long wanted to see Windows wiped from existence. Thirty years, in those same people reluctantly send their pound of flesh to Redmond every release cycle.

    Maybe in another thirty years there will be an open source desktop OS with more than single digit percentage use on the desktop.

  • The first time change after it came out, during a LAN party, I was still one of the DOS users. At midnight all the Windows 95 boxes rebooted themselves and the DOS users declared victory

  • by taylorius ( 221419 ) on Saturday November 21, 2015 @05:33AM (#50974851) Homepage

    The reason WIndows takes a lot of tech support resources is because the whole world uses it for everything. If everyday people tried using Linux all the time, there would be just as many problems.

  • My fondest memory is the day after I finished my previous job where I realized that I would never accept a job again that required me to use it. Fingers crossed anyway.

  • Thank you for years and years of job security, including the foreseeable future, on behalf of everyone in IT security.

  • That Commodore had a fully preemptive multitasking operating system (AmigaOS) during the same time Microsoft was trying to get Windows working with only task switching. Microsofts OS has been playing "catch up" ever since....

  • Mine was v3.0 [wikipedia.org] on a couple International Business Machine (IBM) [ibm.com] Personal System (PS)/2 [wikipedia.org] machines (models 30 (286 10 Mhz) and P70 (386)). :O

    • Mine was Windows 3.1?@#?$w1

      Before that we used PC's with DOS

      iirc our school couldn't afford a computer with enough RAM to have a GUI OS

      • by antdude ( 79039 )

        Good old DOS. I used IBM DOS v4.0 during my early PC days. V4.0 was horrible due to its memory management like its free conventional memory. Argh! :( DOS v3.3 and v5+ were way better.

  • What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?

    i liked it when it actually helped me do something productive and worked with no malfunctions, which mostly happened when doing database analysis with some kind of spreadsheet or relational database software

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