Microsoft Windows Turns 40 (neowin.net) 97
Long-time Slashdot reader cusco writes: Forty years ago today Microsoft introduced its new Graphical User Interface for MS-DOS. Inspired by the Xerox PARC project Alto, as was the Apple Mac, it was their first attempt to address the user unfriendliness of the standard computer interface. Named Windows 1.0 after the "windows" it created to view individual running programs, it generated quite a bit of interest at the initial reveal. Unfortunately, difficulty in ironing out bugs (especially in memory management) delayed release for two years, to November 1985.
You are supposed to turn smarter (Score:2, Funny)
You are supposed to turn smarter by the time you reach 40. Sadly, some people/things don't. /s
Re:You are supposed to turn smarter (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be too young to remember those early versions of Windows. They made today's versions look fantastic. As late as Windows 3.0, if you deleted a folder in File Manager (now called File Explorer), it would delete one file, then refresh the entire tree, then delete the second file, and so on. It took *forever.* That's just one example. It was clunky and very limited. File names could have only 8 characters. Many things that you wanted to do, could only be done in the command line.
Yeah I get it, Windows isn't popular here on Slashdot. But it has indeed come a long way since 1983.
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Nah, I still have the diskettes for Windows 1.0 install although I haven't tried them in a long time and they probably went stale. Maybe I should have copied the images somewhere. Anyway, if you take into consideration the eras, I'd put Windows 1.0 well above current versions smartness wise. Windows 2000 was great although. I also liked DOS a lot and did a lot with it, terminate and stay resident etc., you name it. It was easy to modify with your own assembly routines although everything ran as "root" back
Re:You are supposed to turn smarter (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, if you take into consideration the eras, I'd put Windows 1.0 well above current versions smartness wise.
I don't know how smart the OS itself was, but to write programs for it you had to be a frigging genius. Their attempt to abstract 8086-compatible segmented memory management (along with all the "resources" and boilerplate files that went along with it) was probably the most unwieldy programming API I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing.
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Looks like it is on archive.org, if that's your thing.
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You mean it came from completely crappy to mostly crappy? Wellm for the functionality I actually agree, but security and reliability seems to be getting constantly worse since Win7.
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You have to take things in context. When Windows 1.0 came out, it was revolutionary. But compared to today's Windows, it was very rudimentary. This is by definition the maturation process of the software.
What exactly was more secure in Windows 7 than Windows 10 or 11?
When it comes to reliability, I now go years between BSODs. That certainly wasn't true of Windows 7.
So sorry, I don't follow your logic.
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That is because you have never worked with a well-designed OS, sollid upgrade processes and good security. If all you ever see is that 3rd rated MS crap, you can be conned into thinking it is good. It is not.
Here is what "stable" in a GUI means, for example: I am using a 30 year old FVWM configuration that still works perfectly fine and is a lot more comfortable to work with than the Windows GUI ever was. In all those 30 years, I had to spend an hour or two _once_ to adjust the configuration to FVWM2 and th
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First, don't assume you know what my experience is. I've built numerous Linux distros, plus Unix, Windows, DOS, Mac, Amiga, Android. Linux is known for a lot of things, but good upgrade process is not one of them. Why does every distro have to have its own unique installation mechanism? That by itself significantly hurts the popularity of Linux on the desktop. When it comes to seamless installs, Android and iOS take the prize. App installs and upgrades are both simple and automated. In recent years, Windows
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Be careful! If you suggest Linux isn't really as secure as fanbois think, because thousands of hackers aren't attacking it round the clock in sus countries as with Windows, you'll get modded down.
Which has been happening on slashdot for, well, almost half of Windows' lifespan.
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What??? Next you'll tell me I shouldn't suggest out loud that the "year of the Linux desktop" won't be coming any time soon!
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If your FVWM is so great, why aren't millions of people using it?
Argumentum ad populum [wikipedia.org]. That's a logical fallacy. Don't do it again.
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Thanks. Was going to point that out. Apparently there are still nil-wits about that repeat the common fallacies over and over again, in a fashion completely bereft of any actual insight.
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Stability is not the primary goal of an OS. It's an important goal, yes. But usability (user friendliness, and support for a wide variety of use cases) is equally important. Such usability can *only* happen when there *is* a large user base, otherwise, there is no motivation by the developers to do all the work required to support a million different kinds of users.
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Nonsense. An OS does not even need a user interface.That is just a sub-set of OSes. See, I can go blatantly off-topic too.
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It just happens to be the subset of OSes that people actually use, ad happens to be the subset of OSes under discussion here.
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Do you have trouble understanding what "off-topic" means? Because it looks like you do.
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The topic, to which I originally replied at the very top of this thread, is whether or not Windows has improved (become "smarter") over time. My contention is that it certainly has. You contended that FVWM is a better option than Windows because it is "stable." (You brought stability into the conversation, not me.) My response was that stability isn't the primary goal of an OS, that supporting users' use cases is probably more important. It seems like a coherent thread of conversation to me.
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Nit-wit here. Argumentum ad populum applies to people's beliefs, not to the usability of software. I've responded more fully directly to the above post.
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Argumentum ad populum applies to people's beliefs, not to the usability of software. There is a very specific way in which the number of users matters for software, and it has nothing to do with lots of people believing or asserting some particular belief. It *does* have everything to do with fitness for a diverse set of use cases. For FVWM to be a truly outstanding software system, it would have to meet the needs of a wide variety of users, who have many diverse needs for what a computer can do for them. F
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Bullshit. You may have done things, but you clearly did not gain experience from it. You arguments are shallow repetition of marketing claims and lack insight and depth.
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I linked sources to make my points. Where are yours? Which of my statements specifically do you take issue with?
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You have to take things in context. When Windows 1.0 came out, it was revolutionary.
It wasn't revolutionary in 1985. Even XWindows was released before that. Microsoft was trying to catch up (and poorly). Microsoft had good marketing though.
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In terms of home computers that were available at the time, yes, it was revolutionary. Nobody back then was selling Unix to individuals, and licenses cost hundreds of dollars. At that time, Linux wasn't a thing yet.
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Yes, I'm old. Old enough to remember Windows when it was just a file manager! He started crappy, and he'll end crappy!
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Eight characters for the file name plus three more for the extension. But that wasn't a restriction set by Windows, it was how DOS worked.
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Of course it's how DOS worked. That doesn't make it any less rudimentary. Even in those days, other systems like Unix allowed file names to be whatever length you wanted.
The extension was never considered part of the file "name" per se, meaning that for most files, you couldn't just use whatever extension you wanted, it was an identifier that indicated what program should open the file.
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I fully understand your point. You're not wrong.
Eventually, Microsoft removed this restriction in MS DOS 5.0, which was released in conjunction with Windows 95, to eliminate the restriction.
It doesn't matter whether the restriction came from DOS (which it did), or from Windows itself. It remains one of many points on which Windows 1.0 was rudimentary compared to today's Windows.
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On a Mac, we were astounded you could click a file, and its program would start up and open the file! Like, how did the computer know to do that?
I had forgotten about that bit of wonderment, thanks!
Re: You are supposed to turn smarter (Score:2)
Some dos programs completely refused to open files with alternate file extensions. Never seen it in Windows but I bet there are some, but at least there if they used standard controls in standard ways you could select them.
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Yes, yes, it did improve over the years... until it peaked when it was about 20. And now, it's past its prime, it's old, set in its ways, getting more and more demanding, is constantly nagging you with crap nobody gives a fuck about, and whenever you finally got it to drop all those annoying habits it developed recently it decides that, nope, you got it all wrong and it knows way better how your home should look like, it throws out all the carefully arranged furniture and moves in its old, dated crap again.
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It sounds like you don't like change! You weren't very specific about your complaints, so I really don't have a way to respond.
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Change for the sake of change is stupid. I am all for improving what needs improving, but there's a point where things are as good as they will get.
I used to believe the "change is good" gospel and yes, when I was young, change was good. New computers were faster, offered more ram, more capabilities, better graphics, better sound, better handling... but at some point change was no longer for my advantage. Suddenly it meant that I have to keep my computer online all the time, not because I wanted but because
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Change for the sake of change is stupid.
That may be true. But you haven't shown that the changes in Windows are just "for the sake of change." Are you personally aware of the motivations of Microsoft engineers, for each change in Windows? I doubt it. They have a lot of customers with a lot of different use cases. It may be that the changes don't affect YOU but there's probably somebody else out there who wants many of those changes.
A few years ago, I worked for a software company in the healthcare industry. Our customers were doctors. They would
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Haha... I remember working in a Mac lab at college in the late 90's, and had to copy a few hundred files over a network. The Mac opened, updated, and closed a dialog window for each file it needed to copy, so the whole copy process took about 5 minutes.
Windows98 (or was it 95?) was smart enough to batch the files together in one dialog window, so it did the same copy in less than 10 seconds. Early versions of Windows were bad, but it improved very quickly. It look a LONG time for Apple to improve MacOS,
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Yep, Amiga was amazing, but it had serious memory problems. It was the first fully object-oriented OS. I miss those days in some ways, but in others, not so much!
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Looks more like early onset dementia to me...
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Operating systems age in dog years it seems. Windows got better and better until about 20 years ago, and now it's in rapid decline like your granny who used to be a really looker when gramps met her but now looks like a withered old prune.
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You are supposed to turn smarter by the time you reach 40. Sadly, some people/things don't. /s
Windows at 40 may not be wiser, but it does have quite a beer belly.
Gotta love how the article uses the word "Windows" (Score:1)
....like Microsoft actually coined the term.
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It's called : X Window (no s and no -) and it's still alive and doing well despite many people wanting to kill it nowadays. I still use it daily.
https://www.x.org/wiki/ [x.org]
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Windows isn't 40 (Score:3)
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Re:Windows isn't 40 (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Windows isn't 40 (Score:2)
I do not share their optimism.
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For a few years there, Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell was everything I wanted in a Windows OS. Under the hood, it felt like Windows 7 + some nice extras, like the ability to natively mount ISO files (and VHD maybe?).
Re: Windows isn't 40 (Score:2)
I still miss Win2000 and OS/2 2.1
But will it make it to 50? (Score:3)
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Microsoft gave up on Internet Explorer, yes. But they replaced it with another browser, Edge, and they certainly haven't given up on that.
I don't think you realize how popular Windows is with enterprise IT departments. Windows is quite firmly entrenched in the business world, in large part because they let IT security folks play with all kinds of settings to lock down systems.
Windows isn't going anywhere anytime soon, I'm afraid.
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Depends on the size of the enterprise, didn't Google replace desktops with ChromeOS? Windows didn't meet their security requirements, so they made their own.
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Yes, Google did announce they would move towards ChromeOS for non-developers. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/0... [cnbc.com] They have relied heavily on Windows in the past. https://www.wired.com/2012/05/... [wired.com].
Google is an outlier. It has significant resources to pour into making ChromeOS work for them. They literally build the OS themselves. Not many corporations have this luxury. That means that if they try to move to something like ChromeOS, they can't just add features that are missing, for their own purposes. There i
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Well ChromeOS is an online experience mostly, I don't like online things, but when windows is subject to notpetya style problems and crypto lockers, it seems online ChromeOS is the best idea if you can't get business agreement for linux
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Active Directory, Group Policy and NTFS will ensure that Windows will rule the business world for years to come, since Linux doesn't have a replacement to any of them.
Re: But will it make it to 50? (Score:2)
What does NTFS do that modern file systems do not?
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To my knowledge it's the only journaling file system that has passed the Pentagon's security tests, and integrates with the AWS and Azure native authentication systems. I believe it's the only file system approved for portable hard drives. I don't know if that's still true, but it was a decade ago. The Pentagon is a huge customer for Windows systems, mostly because of NTFS but also since almost all recruits have had experience with it before entering the service.
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I see it living on for servers and OT type stuff but its heyday is over. There is a
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Windows is quite firmly entrenched in the business world, in large part because they let IT security folks play with all kinds of settings to lock down systems.
That is definitely not why lol.
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Yes, it is. https://www.pcworld.com/articl... [pcworld.com] See points 3 and 4 in particular.
You got a source to share, that contradicts this?
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If we're discussing opinions, you've never even stated yours, you just said "no it's not." What do *you* think keeps businesses coming back to Microsoft?
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Sure, but there are many variations of this negotiation between executives and IT. In companies where security is a priority, such as in healthcare, IT has more say.
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Even hospitals don't have unlimited funds to upgrade that $15M CT scanner that happens to be using an old version of embedded Windows. And when they do upgrade, they aren't moving away from Windows, they're just moving to newer versions. Same goes for Internet Explorer. Hospitals and doctors were stuck on IE for many years due to software and hardware that depended on it, but they were finally forced off by HIPAA.
Like everything else, security is a cost/benefit analysis. And in healthcare, the costs are ver
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Microsoft already gave up their web browser
They did nothing of the sort. They simply outsourced the engine to someone else. If you think Edge is just Chrome with a re-skin it's clear that you've not used it. It has some quite significant differences under the hood, as well as UI and some extensive integration with other Microsoft programs.
will Microsoft do the engine change since NT and make Windows 12 a fully Linux based OS with WDDM instead of Wayland?
No, why would they? Under the hood there are very VERY big differences that would take decades to rationalise in a way that doesn't break end user software. And end user software is entirely what they are focusing
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Forgot to mention: The reason the Windows thing is different from the Browser thing, is application compatibility. The web already ran on Chrome, just as well (actually better than) as it did on Edge. Windows software does not run on Linux, especially the complex low level software with hooks deep in the OS that makes the corporate world go round.
You know what's harder to believe? (Score:2)
That Weezer has been around that long [youtu.be].
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DESQview was pretty cool (Score:2)
Speaking of ancient history, does anyone here remember DESQview [wikipedia.org]?
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Appropriate for a thread about an innovative company that fell back into "mee too" mode, waiting for others to do innovation then trying to muscle there way into successful products by duplicating. mp3 player, iPhone, search engine, browser
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I didn't use that but I was a big fan (and registered user) of 4DOS. Friend, you could feel the power.
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Speaking of ancient history, does anyone here remember DESQview [wikipedia.org]?
I remember it well. I used it. I liked it. I still have those disks stashed away somewhere.
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Yeah. I used to use Desqview and GEM. However, my favourite interface of the era was that provided by RISCOS, Acorn Archimedes' graphical OS. But Acorn never really evolved it and never really took it forward as a general OS for ARM-based systems.
Thanks Microsoft! (Score:2)
For turning a virtual artform capable of
liberating the toils of billions into a
dumbed-down lowest-common-denominator
sadistic anal rape.
Here's looking at GNU, pals!
Sincerely,
Mrs. Edna Schopenhauer
Brainbridge, Indiana
More accurately... (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia:
The development of Windows began after Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the lead developer of Windows, saw a demonstration at COMDEX 1982 of VisiCorp's Visi On, a GUI software suite for IBM PC compatible computers. A year later, Microsoft learned that Apple's own GUI software—also bit-mapped, and based in part on research from Xerox PARC—was much more advanced; Microsoft decided they needed to differentiate their own offering. In August 1983, Gates recruited Scott A. McGregor, one of the key developers behind PARC's original windowing system, to be the developer team lead for Windows 1.0.
GrahamJ: More accurately... (Score:2)
GrahamJ [slashdot.org]: “The development of Windows began after Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the lead developer of Windows, saw a demonstration at COMDEX 1982 of VisiCorp's Visi On, a GUI software suite for IBM PC compatible computers. A year l
Windows 95 (Score:3)
My first real experience with Windows was version 3.1. I learned how to write Windows app in that using the Borland C++ IDE. It was not the most stable thing and it was fun to watch it crash it with my stupid mistakes that overflowed the program stack and ate the OS.
But then Windows 95 came out and everything changed. Yes, as an operating system it was a piece of shit. But it was also perhaps the most incredible software engineering hack in history. Microsoft was have been then and still is today a shitty company and it has produced a lot of crap over its history but, man, they spent a hell of a lot of time, effort, and money to make sure that the OS worked with every hardware configuration and device they could possibly think of and they mostly got it right. They did a fantastic job.
And then there is the introduction of "plug-and-play", which to me was the best thing since sliced bread. No more having to reconfigure the OS so it could learn about the presence of some new card or device attached to the computer. Windows 95 just figured out what was there and did the appropriate configuration. Of course, it didn't always work right, hence the term "plug and pray ." Still, it was much better that what we had to do in "the old days." Today, the most prominent Linux distributions do plug-and-play and the youngsters today think nothing of it but in 1995 it was something very new and special.
Is this fair? (Score:2)
It was called Windows but version 1 was a total joke and I didn't know of anybody who seriously used Windows until version 3. I didn't think of 1-2 as being anything but a DOS app...
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Nobody used version 1. We used 2.11, but I only really used it to run a DOS program in a window so I could screen capture things for documentation. It was number crunch heavy, and for some reason ran literally about 100 times slower under Windows.
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And you know, less crappy systems didn't have those issues in the first place because they had systems to allow expansion cards to be identified and assigned non-conflicting resources from the begin
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Didn't pick up until Windows 3.0 ... (Score:2)
Windows 1.x and 2.x didn't get much use.
It was Windows 3.0 that started to be widely used starting in 1990, and then 3.1 fixed several things and added some features a few years later.
That created (or enforced) the saying "with Microsoft, always wait till version 3".
Up until that point, the PC world was all MS-DOS and a bit of OS/2.
MS Continuous Improvement (Score:1)
Microsoft strives to improve every program until all joy using it has been removed and it is thoroughly ruined. - NRam
(Someone who enjoys Win10, Office 2007, Picture Manager 12, Visio Technical 2000, PhotoDraw 2000, QuickC)