Windows Turns 35 (theverge.com) 111
Tom Warren, writing for The Verge: The PC revolution started off life 35 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS. It was a huge milestone that paved the way for the modern versions of Windows we use today. While Windows 10 doesn't look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, and apps like Notepad and MS paint.
Windows no longer exists (Score:3, Insightful)
I got Windows 1.03 (Score:3)
..on 2 diskettes, we thought we were living in the year 2000.
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Windows 1.0 had competition that was much more advanced. I'm not even talking about state of the art workstations, but on the 16-bit PC microcomputer architecture you other GUI platforms for it that sat on top of DOS that were better than Windows 1.0, and probably even 3.0.
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I'm only aware of one GUI which competed with Windows which was technically superior, namely PC-GEOS. The only real advantages it had over Windows were scalable fonts and reduced resource consumption, though, and it didn't come out until the same year that Windows 3.0 did (in 1990.)
Re: I got Windows 1.03 (Score:2)
We had a pc in my school that ran some version of GEM that ran on top of dos that had a bunch of software on it, I think, although we did have a cool/m machine as well that had some graphical interface too i.
Re: I got Windows 1.03 (Score:2)
ISTR getting GEM with DR-DOS, but it is nothing compared to PC-GEOS.
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I don’t want to remember that!
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Windows for Workgroups was (IIRC) was 6 disks, plus one more for the TCP/IP add-on. (It came with NetBEUI, Netware, Banyan Vines and some other by default.) There were two more disks of fonts that you could install that I never bothered with unless forced.
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Banyan Vines...WOW....haven't that name in quite some time.
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Mine came on 4 360Ks (plus Write on a 1.2M), I still have the floppies.
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we thought we were living in the year 2000.
Dang, I thought they'd fixed the Y2K bug by then.
35 Years ago (Score:5, Informative)
First, Microsoft stole the windows idea from Apple who lifted it from Xerox so no revolutionary idea there. Also, Windows didn't start the PC revolution, it was an iteration at best. I would say the personal computer revolution started in 1981 with IBM's release of the first PC.
Re:35 Years ago (Score:4, Informative)
The personal computer revolution started in 1977, with the release of the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80.
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Yes possibly, there were even earlier micros though. Hard to say what the "revolution" was. Apple Ii was nice, but expensive. Not super popular but probably more popular than Commodore. TRS-80 was the most easily available as it was for sale anywhere there was a Radio Shack, you didn't need to be in a big city that had a computer store. It was an iteration starting from the first home computer (Altair?) up to a mass market home computer (Apple II, PET), up through a home computer that was actually used
Re:35 Years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd qualify it this way:
The "microcomputer" revolution started with Apple II + PET + TRS-80. I would say the "PC revolution" started with the release of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software. Although VisiCalc wasn't first released on the IBM PC, VisiCalc propelled business sales, which ultimately led to the "Wintel" platform dominance.
PC's weren't popular for home use until Windows came out. Before Windows, Commodore ruled consumer sales.
(Commodore could have been bigger than Apple today if they had played their cards right. They squandered their early dominance. First, the '64 was hard to modernize & expand because of its finicky architecture, much of it designed to keep it cheap*. Second, the Amiga failed to lash onto desktop publishing quickly enough, leaving that to Mac. They should have made bundling deals with the likes of Aldus. Amiga had hi-res color before Mac. They are the Yahoo of the 80's: given the golden keys to The Future, but misplacing them.)
* Arguably they wouldn't have dominated if they tried to make a more flexible architecture because such abstraction often requires more expensive/powerful hardware. In the early days one had to "play it tight" with hardware to get decent performance. Tramiel was brilliant at squeezing hardware costs, but didn't really understand and/or focus on compatibility and upgrade migration.
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The Apple II was hard to upgrade because of all the clever ways Woz had saved money in the design, too. The Amiga was painted into when it came to major architectural improvements by the graphics architecture. The Mac went through several painful, compatibility-breaking changes because of short-sighted decisions (e.g. storing flags in the top 8 bits of pointers because the 68000 only had 24 address lines). Did you know that MacOS was so tightly tied to the M68k interrupt model that PowerPC Macs were disp
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No, Gates went to Xerox PARC during the same period that Jobs did (unlike Jobs he never claimed to have invented it all out of his own brilliance). He said at one point that if Microsoft had had the money at the time he would have hired the entire PARC development staff.
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Everyone was doing it back then. Amiga OS was out with a much more advanced GUI OS than anyone else, there was GEM from Digital Research... I think GEOS was around.
Many apps at that time would have been better off remaining text based.
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Microsoft stole the windows idea from Apple who lifted it from Xerox
Representatives from both Apple and Microsoft were invited to Xerox to see their GUI, and the idea is substantially older [wikipedia.org] than Xerox's involvement.
Also, Windows didn't start the PC revolution, it was an iteration at best. I would say the personal computer revolution started in 1981 with IBM's release of the first PC.
Windows DID start the "PC revolution" as we know it, by making the then-dominant IBM PC and compatibles convenient to use. If you mean PC as "Personal Computer" and not "IBM PC", it was begun with Apple with the release of the Apple I in 1977, and the Apple II in 1978. The Apple II was the first reasonably priced, fully-assembled personal computer product. If you
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>who lifted it from Xerox
that urban legend again . . .
Apple had mockups of the Lisa display and influence *BEFORE* the PARC visit.
Yes, the visit influenced the ultimate design, but it was very much not the source, nor was it "lifted."
And the Xerox design itself relied heavily upon and implemented the work of . . . Macintosh engineer Jeff Raskins, and what he wrote in his 1960s masters' thesis!
But the Xerox "origin" still gets repeated, evener among people who should know better.
hawk
I remember demo'ing Zenith Computers with this (Score:3)
The Mac was out and totally blew away the Windows experience. But hey, I tried.
The Second Most Important Contribution from MS (Score:3)
Alt-Tab
I can't believe how many people learn Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, even Ctrl-X and Ctrl-Z, but never Alt-Tab. I use it all the time, and it's so ubiquitous that I use it in Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and many others.
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Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, even Ctrl-X and Ctrl-Z,
Microsoft should also be given credit for weaning people off the Ctrl+Insert , Shift+Insert, Shift+Delete that some programs used in MS-DOS days, (and ensuring that menus mentioned the Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+X options), to reinforce the message, even while both shortcuts were supported
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Maybe you mean that windows made it famous, but that didn't happen until windows implemented "Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to login", which wasn't until (I think) Windows NT or later operating systems.
If that was your first experience with Windows and Ctrl-Alt-Del then I suspect you didn't use Windows 3, Windows 95, or Windows 98 much. Those crashed regularly and Ctrl-Alt-Del was the first line of defense to try to recover the system. Of course if you made it all the way to the BSoD then you needed the power switch, but some times if you were lucky applications would only crash enough that you could get the system going again with the three-finger-salute.
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Power switch? You pressed the RESET button.
The "Power Switch" was for turning the power on when the computer was first plugged in and then to turn it off just before throwing it in the skip.
Failure to have a properly functional NMI is a very recent invention of the kiddies.
*what* reset button? (Score:2)
The IBM PC didn't have a reset button!
The three fingered salute was supposed to have been enough.
In practice, stuff that actually locked up under DOS generally locked hard enough that the salute didn't do it, and you had to power cycle. (and the manual said to wait something like 17 seconds after killing power before turning back on, for fear of harming the power supply).
I don't, however, recall many lockups of any micros being very common until windows 3.1 (I can't tell you how common they were for the ra
Re:The Second Most Important Contribution from MS (Score:4, Informative)
GEM was already much better (Score:3, Interesting)
but failed like betamax.
Incorrect history - not 35 years (Score:5, Informative)
The personal computer (PC) has been around since 1974. That's the Altair.
S-200 Bus computers were around throughout the 1970s.
That's 40-46 years ago.
The first fully-built "no assembly required" personal computers were things like the ... and eventually also the IBM Personal
Radio Shack TRS-80, TI 99/4, Apple II,
Computer in 1981.
That's 39 years ago.
In time the market did its thing, and business users helped consolidate the market,
and so now we call it a "PC" but was first "*The* IBM Personal Computer. It ran PC-DOS.
MS-DOS, Microsoft's first self-named OS was released in 1982.
That's 38 years ago.
I guess if you want to pick an arbitrary version of Microsoft Windows between V1.0 and V3.0
and claim it was 35 years ago... you can do so.
Claiming incorrect facts in print started longer than 35 years ago also.
Great weekend and peace to all. Stay safe!
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Thanks for the trip back memory lane! You're right, it was the S-100 bus.
Also true "multitasking" was in the Amiga in the late 1980s, but didn't come to "Windows" until 3.0.
It's a shame that Atari and Commodore went into a scorched-earth war. Shame about Jack Tramiel.
I sure enjoyed my 500!
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Also true "multitasking" was in the Amiga in the late 1980s, but didn't come to "Windows" until 3.0.
The Amiga's OS was the first consumer OS to have preemptive multitasking in 1985, but Windows didn't get that until NT and 95. Windows 3.0 used cooperative multitasking (just like the Mac at the time), and would happily lock the entire system up tight if any application failed to call its GetMessage()/DispatchMessage() loop regularly.
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As someone who was active in computing in the 1980s, I can tell you that if you'd said "The salesman said this copy of Wordperfect works on all PCs, but I took it home and it doesn't work on my Amiga" you would have been laughed at.
Especially since they had bridgecards for Amigas with expansion slots. I knew someone who had one in their Amiga 2000. It ran DOS programs just fine :)
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The 1970s are when the first attempts at personal computers started. The 1980s was where we figured out how to make them useful. And at some point in the 1990s, it was all over.
Microsoft's dominance in the business world cannot be over-stated. In the 1980's, as more and more non-tech businesses moved away from remote dumb terminals to desktop computers, the OS in the box on the desk was most likely a Microsoft product. As the workplace desktop computer became common, and more and more people used them for their jobs. Those non-tech business users became the largest potential market for home computer sales. Many businesses encouraged employees to get a desktop for home, by offe
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One can look at early products to measure "revolution" or at when sales started spiking. I generally consider "the revolution" using the second because a lot of hardware history influenced the first desktop/home/personal/small computers. Much of it tracks back to integrated circuits, which began in the late 1950's, which track back to semiconductor technology, which was born in the late 1800's (think crystal radios). Thus, there's a long chain of hardware innovation involved.
Looking at the first sales spike
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I found my first copy of Windows in a Corn Flakes box.
AOL (Assholes On Line) later copied this distribution method.
Happy Birthday! (Score:3)
Just today I had a user reboot her computer to fix a VPN issue!
Obligatory link to Windows 1.01 in the browser: (Score:2)
https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=w... [copy.sh]
And of course it's .01. :)
Sadly, no browser in there to run a second layer of it. WhatWG is disappoint. ;)
Horseshit revisionist history started well before. (Score:5, Informative)
The PC revolution did not start 35 years ago. It was well on it's way 35 years ago before Microsoft released a shitty GUI shell for MS-DOS that really was only good for graphically telling you it was out of memory.
Nobody gave two shits about Windows until v3.0 in 1990, and even then half the stuff you ran would run in a DOS shell. Windows didn't actually become useful until well after Windows 95 was released and could control hardware drivers and configuration without having to fuck about in config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to get a god damn sound card working. And really, it was Windows 95 OSR2 which added a modern hardware layer capable of things like AGP video without always having what it thought were IO range conflicts (which, if you solved them, your AGP video would stop working) and USB support.
But hey, I guess for some values of "revolution" yeah I guess Windows was there in 1985 when actually other revolutionary things were happening.
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Nobody gave two shits about Windows until v3.0 in 1990, and even then half the stuff you ran would run in a DOS shell. Windows didn't actually become useful until well after Windows 95 was released and could control hardware drivers and configuration without having to fuck about in config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to get a god damn sound card working.
My memories from the Windows 3.x days were that games ran in DOS and everything else (internet and productivity software) were native Windows apps so unless you were a PC gamer Windows was actually quite useful and it had a big sofware ecosystem even before Win95 came out. But yeah, hardware and driver management sucked in Win 3.x
Keep going ... (Score:1)
While Windows 10 doesn't look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, ...
That they -- and everyone else -- got from Xerox PARC [wikipedia.org]. Just sayin'.
Re: Keep going ... (Score:2)
And was a ad idea to begin with.
Overlapping windows?
Tiny buttons, and an input device that disables all but one of your fingers?
Come on!
All it was, was flashy marketing bling.
Line smartphones today. E.g. their anorexia. Designed to look good in an ad. Not to be actually used.
Re: Keep going ... (Score:2)
Forgot the dumbest of all: The desktop analogy, and its merry skeuomorphic men.
Anyone remember Ms Bob?
Important ... (Score:2)
You forgot the most important one: bugs
What is Windows without bugs?
I remember... (Score:3)
...sitting in the old Edina High School at a meeting of the TCPCUG (Twin Cities PC User Group)...back when personal computing was still considered the realm of hobbyists...
I don't recall if it was TCPC guy or an actual MS rep (we had some cachet by then) who proudly introduced us to Windows95 this would have been around summer of 1993? Most clearly I remember him confidently telling us how Win95 was so clever, if you wanted to move a program from one place to another, say, wordperfect, you could just drag it from one drive to the next and it would work seamlessly, finding everything it needed to automatically. AHAHAAHAHAHA.
Most of us had experience with Win286 or 386 by that time, as I recall not many people had bothered with Win 1.0. (I was partial to Logitech's popdos, not only because it was free with a logitech mouse, but it was much snappier and a unobtrusive tsr that I could pull down or not, as desired, compared to a kludgy win386 "you must always use this interface" that didn't always play nice with applications.)
Forever I'll maintain that it was Windows' easy piracy in those days that made it ubiquitous and Gates a bajillionaire. OS/2 was a far, far better OS at every stage but not so easy to steal so now it's a footnote to history.
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I don't recall if it was TCPC guy or an actual MS rep (we had some cachet by then) who proudly introduced us to Windows95 this would have been around summer of 1993?
Windows 95 came out in... 1995. Second half of 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95 [wikipedia.org]
The predecessor version of Windows was Windows 3.1.
The easy piracy of Windows didn't make Gates wealthy. Licensing agreements that forced hardware vendors to purchase an OS license for every hardware unit sold regardless of whether the end user already had a license or was going to even use Windows played a big role here, along with other hard-nosed business tactics (e.g., destroying competitors like Digital Re
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Windows 95 came out in... 1995. Second half of 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, but betas were floating around as floppy images. I downloaded one in early to mid '95 (can't remember specifically) and ran it on a PS/ValuePoint 486SLC system, on which I had also run OS/2 3.0. And AFAIK there had been betas loose much earlier.
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I didn't say it was released, this was someone "showing us" what was probably a late beta to gin up interest and buzz. I recall at the time wondering who might have a copy I could copy as it specifically WASN'T out yet.
Pretty sure the last one before Win9X was 3.11 (that may have been Windows for Workgroups?)
The piracy ITSELF obviously didn't make him wealthy, what I was implying was that the universality of Windows made him wealthy, because PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE was familiar with it, making it an easy-buy
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Bingo on the easy piracy. I've always seen that as a strategic "flaw".
Windows 1.0 was not supposed to succeed MS-DOS (Score:2)
It was built on top of DOS. OS/2 . Certainly in 1985, that was the plan between IBM and Microsoft. OS/2 1.0 shipped in 1987.
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AARD, Matey!
MS-Windows was just a msdos application (Score:1)
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Windows as an OS only happened when Microsoft broke the JAD with IBM and turned OS/2 3.0 into OS/2 New Technology (which they later renamed to Windows New Technology, then to Windows NT). Microsoft then spent about 10 years X-ing (ActiveX, DirectX, ThisX and ThatX) the technology to remove all the traces of patented IBM technology to which they were not entitled, leaving them with a dodgy hunk of shit that did not work very well and still has problems (scheduling, memory management, interrupt handling, swa
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Yeah an application that would slow your whole PC to a crawl and limit access to your own hardware making it unsuitable for any graphical kind of work or games. No one ran AutoCad or Doom on Windows 3.11.
The PC revolution -- um no. (Score:3)
The PC 's were well on their way to wide stream adoption before windows came out. When it first came out it was basically a glorified UI / program manager around MS-DOS. IBM-DOS was also not a bad product , but the Apple IIe , Apple IIc , TRS-80 and commedore-64 all had their own systems and were useful for work of one kind or another. A lot of good tech and innovative ideas were simply out marketed by louder voices and I honestly think MS held the PC market back by 3 to 8 years of advancements vs had they not been in the market at all. OS/2 was a far better product. X-windows/Linux was not bad either and mac OS , not to mention XOS all had some very good tech that took much longer to be adopted because MS did not play well with others but managed to weasel it's way into the majority of the PC market by being cheaper and having better marketing.
Windows 1 was... (Score:2)
... good for a laugh. It shipped with some Zenith PCs we had had received at work. I installed Windows 1.0 from the floppies and it was good for a laugh. My boss and I just shook our heads in disbelief. Non-overlapping windows on a 640x200 graphics display was a bad joke. It wasn't until Win2.x and Win386 that anything beyond DOS got much use at work and, heck, by the time we were using '396s at work, my home system was already dual-booting Coherent and the Win386 partition got used very infrequently. But..
Not gonna complain (Score:4, Interesting)
I started out with MSDOS, and thought Windows was for wimps. I suffered through all the various versions, stayed with Win 7 for as long as I could, then finally made the switch to Win10 on modern hardware (Zen 2, NVMe, etc.) I have to say I'm pretty happy with it. It's fast, slick, and stays out of my way (after tweaking with ShutUp10 and ClassicShell). Settings got moved around, but I figured out where to find things, and there's some functionality and low-level access that's improved.
I'm not saying it's anywhere near perfect, but all my long-time apps work fine, everything is ultra fast, and my 4K monitor looks great. What's not to love?
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I'm not saying it's anywhere near perfect, but all my long-time apps work fine,
That's a win over Apple, where you shouldn't expect any app to work longer than three years.
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I am still using 64-bit W7. I still don't like W10. I was hoping MS would fix it by then, but it still has issues. I do use mac OS and Linux so I might use them more in the future, but they also have their own issues. I use all!
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Win10 is definitely worse than Win7 in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I'm just glad to be able to use modern hardware without jumping thru hoops, and to be on an upgrade path that lets me take advantage of security fixes.
And really, I spend most of my time in one or another application, so if they run fast and smooth that's all I care about. As far as the OS goes, it's still got the same basic structure as previous Windows, and there are definitely ways to tweak (almost) any behavior that bothers you.
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The PC revolution started ten years earlier. (Score:3)
I know, I was there. And this is the machine that kicked it off [wikipedia.org]. It ran CP/M, which was released forty-six years ago.
The IBM PC project was an attempt by IBM to capture the nascent market on office personal computers before CP/M running on S100 bus hardware could get gain a foothold. That was a real danger because those machines while primitive by modern standards were quite solid, reliable and versatile. Apple also had a pretty good primitive computer out at the time -- the Apple II.
MS-DOS started just a quick and dirty CP/M clone tro run on x86 instead of 8080 ISA. IBM couldn't be bothered to make an operating system for a toy like the IBM-PC, so they turned to Microsoft. Microsoft found Tim Paterson and paid him $75K for his CP/M clone.
Around the same time that MS-DOS came out, Digital Research also released a 16 bit version of CP/M. But MS-DOS had a huge advantage -- businesses were snapping up IBM-PCs because having an "IBM" on your desk was a big status symbol. The thing was, it was pretty much a paperweight. There wasn't any compelling software to run on it. Forget word processing. Executives didn't do their own typing. They dictated into a recorder and a girl from the typing pool transcribed it.
So the PC was well on its way to fulfill IBM's plan for it, to be a quick and dirty little money spinner, when an actual useful piece of software arrived for it in January of 1983: Lotus 1-2-3. With the arrival of a spreadsheet program, all those expensive paperweights on peoples' desks became *very* useful. Lotus was the killer app and what created Microsoft's future dominance in desktop operating systems.
This is a classic example of market positioning and network effects beating technology. At the time MS-DOS was becoming an industry standard, far more advanced operating systems were appearing on cheap hardware. OS-9 (Not MacOS-9) was a unix like operating system released for 6809 in 1979 with an 68000 port in 1983. I can tell you from hands-on experience that was a very advanced operating system for upper-low-end hardware at the time, including preemptive task scheduling, separate user and kernel modes, and on CPUs with an MMU, protected memory. On processors supporting a 32 bit memory address bus they offered a flat memory model.
MS-DOS's unexpected success also upset Microsoft's technology plans. They had licensed UNIX and released Xenix around 1980, expecting Unix-based operating systems to take over computing. But with the anti-trust breakup of AT&T, Bell Labs was free to sell Unix, so Microsoft sold XENIX to SCO. They moved their XENIX engineers to the OS/2 project, which again failed to knock MS-DOS of its throne. MS-DOS and Lotus thrived, in part, because they were in a goldilocks position in 1981: able to take advantage of the very latest affordable hardware in that year. In two or three years hardware far outstripped MS-DOS, but it was too late. DOS was entrenched, and millions of dollars were spent in the economy to make PC do things *despite* DOS.
MS-DOS is like SARS-COV-2. It's not so much that it's remarkable in itself, it's just happened to be perfectly suited to take off under the conditions that prevailed.
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I agree, except I wouldn't characterize it as anything like "stealing". Some of the things MS did later were morally dubious, but jumping on an opportunity a company you're partnering with isn't interested in is just business.
I once gave a customer a three year exclusive rights to use our software in his local market in order to make a sale. That wasn't exactly a win-win deal, it was a deal that recognized differences of opinion in the market outlook for his state. He thought the market was going to expl
My symphathies... (Score:2)
'98 SE was my last Microsoft OS. Really don't know why so many have been so willing to give up so much for so little for so long.
Once again, much thanks to the thousands who have made open-source work so well for me.
Windows for President! (Score:2)
It's 35, it was born in the USA, so now it's eligible.
Hey, it can't do much worse.
What? (Score:2)
Windows turns 35 - still playing catchup (Score:2)
Enumerating such things as scroll-bars, drop-down menus, icons, and dialog boxes as high points is rather sad. Such things were STANDARD features of graphical user interfaces long before that.
Windows 1.x was an attempt to compete with Norton Commander. The Apple Mac had come out more than a year before that - and Microsoft's effort was quite sub-par to that.
Windows 1.x used a tiling windows interface, with only one process running at a time.
Network file sharing and printing was done by Novel and Banyan Vi
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Prior to Windows 3.0 there was really no good reason to run it. But there was really no other GUI worth running on a PC, either, because PC-GEOS is just as recent. Windows was better at cooperating with DOS programs, which was a compelling argument.
I think they might have had X Windows for Xenix. I'm not sure because I only ever ran it on a 286 with 1MB RAM, and didn't have enough resources for X. In fact, with a 20MB HDD, I didn't even have room for the compiler. I know they had X for SCO UNIX on 386, thou
SlashDot reviews a 2015 article from TheVerge (Score:2)
The source article for this was from 2015.
Sorry, SlashDot - you've really lost it if it takes you 5 years to paste a 3rd party article in.
Should've retired age 15. (Score:3)
I have fond memories of windows ... and not so fond memories.
Coming from the background of the boom of personal computers in the late 70's, but only being able to afford Sinclair stuff (ZX80/81/Spectrum), it was years after I reconnected with computers again - with DOS. It wasn't even MSDOS, but DR DOS, at a college where I did a course in CAD/CAM.
I loved DOS, not being aware there were actually far better alternatives back then.
In 1995, I landed a job as a draughtsman and used a windows 3.1.1 computer. I hated it. It was running on an 286.
I managed, against all the rules, to install Windows95 on it, finding install disks on the work network.
Wow - that was amazing - it was a revolution to me, it was actually a joy to use.
In the meantime, my brother, a graphic designer, was using MacOS, which at the time, was streets ahead, but windows caught up fast.
The disaster of windows ME & windows 98 is best forgotten, then Microsoft played a blinder with Windows 2000.
To me, that was the height of windows. XP was effectively win2k and to all intents and purposes, so was windows 7.
The rot set in and windows became such a pain to use, I gave up entirely on it - best move I ever made.
After a lengthy foray into the world of Linux, I ended up with MacOS as my primary choice - mainly because of my interests in art and music.
Sure, I could've used Linux for my career as a coder - and indeed did at one point, frequently.
As for windows, sure, I've got a rig for gaming on, that I power up every few weeks.
I generally accept that I will need about an hour to actually be playing a game, after numerous updates, reboots, game updates etc.
Windows 10 and 8 before it are everything that is wrong with an Operating System.
An OS should not get in the way of you doing your work, but windows?
When you have IT departments reminding people to save important work before XYZ time, as there's going to be updates, you know Microsoft have completely failed at producing a decent OS.
Sadly, they once did - 20 years ago.
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I should add, that aside from windows NT/2k/XP, everything microsoft ever did in terms of operating systems was only ever "Just good enough."
That didn't matter - because they had the business nous to sell these sub-standard operating systems.
The rest is history - Microsoft continue to produce "Just good enough" operating systems.
Notepad (Score:1)
Notepad is my most used/go-to windows app.
When writing, corresponding, convey information, etc. I end up using notepad as a scrubbing tool to allow a base level of sanity on whichever text I am manipulating.
I didn't even know what Windows was until the1990s (Score:2)
I was in middle school by then but my dad had 2 IBM pcs an XT and later an AT 286. For 10 years DOS was all I knew besides a few Apple IIs and early Macs at school. Offices all used DOS and no one used windows until the mid 1990s. My fathers work included and a few terminals existed for DEC stuff.
To claim Windows = the PC revolution is ingenuine as that POS OS was laughed at until the PHB's in the office started demanding programs that ran on them forcing it upon the rest of us. PC revolution was pre IBM ev
Windows wasn't the first GUI (Score:3)
Windows only rose to prominence because it was the best-marketed GUI. It was far from being the first, and even farther from being the best.
Keep in mind also that GUIs were intended to make computer functionality available to managers who weren't familiar with how computers actually worked. Just imagine if managers had to write actual code, or know how to work from the command line. Or, going back just a little further in time, maybe even have to learn JCL.
No, not marketing (Score:2)
That's not what happened.
DR-DOS had reached about 10% market share.
MS entered licensing agreements in which paying them a royalty on every unit sold for W3.1+DOS cost less than paying the DOS royalty on 90% of machines shipped.
And then there was that little fiasco where the tech review prerelease of 3.1 had some encrypted code--the only encrypted code in it--that checked to make sure that it was MS DOS (W3.1 was a dos program itself), and simply hung without a message if it wasn't--creating the reports that
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Open Source for Windoze on 35th Anniversary! HOOAH (Score:1)
Re:Correction (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, when I look at all the things I could on my computer 35 years ago compared to now. Oh wait that de-evolution didn't happen and you were talking out of your arse. Excuse me while I go woosh myself.
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People seem nostalgic about Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but the facts are that Win2k wasn't any good until SP4 and WinXP wasn't any good until SP3. Windows NT4 was good, OS/2 Warp was good and that were projects closely related to not Microsoft.
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I guess when you have nothing but shit for so long an alternative seems better than reality.
A few months ago on youtube I get into a flamewar on someone saying how much faster and securre WindowsXP was. Another with a NExt video where Steve Jobs tried to run Dos/Lotus on it with Smart Windows and I was flamed as stupid because DOS was so amazing. WTF.
They don't remember XP being infected within 30 second on going to the internet :-D. Shit some broadband modems back then without firewalls you could b
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That doesn't even address that these service pacts were as good as they might have been.
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Implying that a bit of phoning home counters the very real advancements made in the OS under the hood. I like your altruistic view, but like the nearly everyone else in the world who doesn't give a shit about phoning home and doesn't even remotely think it has anything at all to do with what you can and can't do with your computer, I simply don't subscribe to it.
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Stuff is complex. People view an OS today like a screen for the programs and do not think about it. Linux is an exception as the focus is on the OS. I bet the people complaining about spyware have no problem using a Google Android Phone :-D
If they run a non Ubuntu distro and Firefox then I will give them some respect at least but if they use Chrome while bashing Microsoft then nah.
Back to the point when XP borrowed NT and ran regular programs with regular hardware then the why upgrade? It is valid. Security
Re:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd think that Microsoft's dominance and dirty tricks in the PC industry in the '90s did not really cause any forward or backward progression, but it held progress back because they had smashed the competitors in the same fields.
It was only because of things that Microsoft didn't focus on that we are where we are today: things such as Linux and the Internet.
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Quite fascinating story, which I missed at the time on account of me being too young ( and not understanding english yet).
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Possibly, possibly not. Dominance stifles competitor innovation but at the same time makes it easier to force adopt innovation itself. Just take a look at the modern browser. All it takes is for Google to start throwing warnings about certificates and webmasters collectively fall over themselves to finally ditch the 10 year old broken security standard they were using.
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The internet and also the price of the PC going down mixed with much better development tools meant the barriers of entry to write something and compete went down. Without either of these 3 things Microsoft never would have been stupped.
I mean who in 1981 knew how to write code? Or owned or had access to a computer? 1997 it was very different with $40 books, webpages, and community college courses.
It was inevitable Microsoft would loose. I didn't see it 20 years ago but I understand Bill Gates fear of Netsc
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Re: i'd be happy using (Score:2)
Agreed on OS/2.
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Ah yes - OS/2. I don't think they ever managed to solve the problem where you would drop an application icon onto itself when trying to move it a few pixel, did they?