Back in 1983, 25 years ago, the world was quite different. The market for the home computer – still a fairly new market – was wide open, but Apple was about to make a major splash with its Macintosh. It was also the year in which a company from Redmond first introduced its “Windows” operating system. What is this Windows you speak of?
November 10, 1983, the day on which Bill Gates first unveiled Windows 1.0 to the world. He did so during an unprecedented elaborate event at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York City. An extension to the popular MS-DOS, Windows 1.0 has a graphical user interface, with menus, icons, tiled windows, and multitasking.
Bill Gates predicted it would run on 90% of the world’s PCs by the end of 1984. The reality was a tad bit different – Windows 1.0 didn’t see release until 1985, and probably sold around 3 copies. However, as is often the case with Microsoft, the company persisted, and years later, it would be the dominant force in the operating system industry – and it still is today.
That Windows 1 sucked plums. It was not until Windows 2 that people began to see the potential.
I myself did not, I prefered Geoworks or Desqview at the time.
I was starting to come around to Windows when I had a go on Windows 3.0, but still prefered DOS.
Windows 3.1 did not do much to change my mind, but Windows 3.11 did.
After using that happily for a few years, Win 95 came out, then it all started to go downhill.
My last happy experience with Windows was with Win2k. I long for those days again with every new release. Hoping that it will get me as excited as it did in the 3.11 or 2k releases. Heres hoping.
I’ve been with Windows since Windows/286 and 386 (Windows 2.1). Those were the days, man still remember my AST 286/386sx. Take a look here on how Windows has grown. http://www.infosatellite.com/news/2001/10/a251001windowshistory_scr…
Edited 2008-11-11 21:50 UTC
Yes, and I remember that W286 would boot on 512K of ram.
Windows 2000 was an excellent system. My employer still uses it over 800 desktops in our workplace.
New guys come in and bitch about XP, and can they have that, but after a day or two, they dont notice the difference
Yup, 2k was ok, but don’t you think it’s a little unsafe to be running an OS that’s no longer supported?
Apart from that, I believe it’s a pain that it doesn’t have its own wifi tools (many 2k wifi drivers don’t even support wpa)
There are third party programs that all you to use WPA on Windows 2000.
It´s near to Windows 7 and I don´t see the potential jet.
Oh well, yes, the potential to eat resources that are not at my disposal anymore.Four cores, 4 GB ram, and day to day task are slower than 25 years ago
Well, that’s going to be allright since they demoed Windows 7 on a netbook class machine… I think we are allowed to hope that they’ll make it possible to create a lean and mean Windows 7 machine.
What was really interesting about 1.0 was the lack of a mouse… Everything worked from the keyboard…
Maybe that’s why Windows has always been better then Mac when it comes to the keyboard…
I was a Mac guy way back then, so WIndows was an interesting thing to see, but like others here have said, I was more interested in what Gem and others were doing, not to mention the Amiga of course…
Oh, anyway, Happy Birthday 😀
Edited 2008-11-11 22:23 UTC
given that no pc at that time came shipped with a mouse, not surprising.
same deal with cd-rom, dvd-rom, and so on.
games and software on cd’s started showing up first when all new pc’s sold had a optical drive. similarly, games started coming on dvd only when a majority had a dvd drive out the box.
usb sticks only really took of when pc’s came with windows that supported the usb storage profile, and computers came with usb ports on the front.
Windows used to be better than Mac with keyboard support, and had the upper hand for a long time. This changed when OS X came out however, and Mac very definitely now has the upper hand especially in recent OS X releases. If you compare Mac’s keyboard navigation to that found in Vista and Office 2007 there is absolutely no contest, OS X blows them out of the water. This is coming from someone who uses the keyboard 100% of the time out of necessity. I’ve yet to see any GUI match the consistency in regards to using the keyboard that OS X now has. Sure, the keys may not work the way you’d expect on other GUIs like windows (page up/page down, for example) but they are consistent throughout. Further, the sheer number of shortcuts in OS X itself is astounding, and first letter navigation works just about everywhere including menus and toolbars. Believe me this does matter if you are using the keyboard 100%. In recent years Windows has become a nightmare to navigate in some areas with the keyboard, and office even worse. Some parts of Vista’s interface are downright clumsy and awkward for keyboard users–the new control panel and start menu just to name two. This doesn’t mean it is not doable, because it is, but it’s very clunky and sometimes horribly slow. Parts of the new control panel, for example, require me to tab through about twenty times to get to the item I want, and there’s no shortcut other than switching to classic mode. This is not the best of ideas, as MS has indicated that classic modes are going away, so I do not want to take the easy way out
. The devil’s in the details, as they say, and OS X has paid very good attention to detail in this area, whereas Microsoft seems to have lost sight of it for the time being.
Try using the search feature in the vista control pannel. I find it works very well and uses live results.
I do the same thing with the start menu.
Good search with live results makes keyboard use of the general OS interface a lot easier.
i wonder if microsoft will have the stamina to stick to something now that bill gates have left.
if there was one person that knew to hang on to an idea that could work, it was him.
i guess thats why both apple and microsoft have stayed around, both have had leaders that would stay true to their ideas no matter what the world where telling them.
the big diff i guess is that jobs is a designer, in his own mind if not in reality. he wants things to look good first and foremost.
gates on the other hand wants things to work, and be used. he is a engineer. see a problem, fix the problem. things like looks and user experience is of lesser importance.
so i guess we can see the slow walk of gates out of microsoft with xp, vista and now win7.
how so? the looks. xp first tried to color up a ui that had stayed more or less static since win95. vista continued that trend. and win7 even more so.
Windows was bad its first decade, extremely buggy in its second, and its third has been an embarrassing failure with Vista, especially when juxtaposed to the exponential growth of Apple and GNU/Linux on PCs.
And now that Vista’s been left for dead by Ballmer, Microsoft pulls the same ol’ hat out of the box: LET’S HYPE THE NEXT VERSION OF VAPORS!! (Win7)
Let’s not.
Edited 2008-11-11 23:17 UTC
Whether you hate Windows or love it, no matter what you think of Microsoft, they did do one thing well–they brought computers out of obscurity into the mainstream for Joe Public. Granted, if MS hadn’t done it someone else would have–and perhaps that would have been for the better–but like it or not, Windows has a very important role in the progression of the home computer.
Edit: wrong tense in the first sentence.
Edited 2008-11-12 01:42 UTC
We had Apple II machines in our junior high and high schools in the Twin Cities in 1979/1980, and many of my friends had Apple II machines in their homes as well.
Microsoft Windows may have helped computer popularity in its day, but Apple had already made the personal computer a popular item several years before Microsoft became a factor.
Of all the normal people I’ve talked to, none of them like or dislike Vista any more than they liked or disliked any previous version of Windows. The vitriol slung at Vista from the increasingly active blogosphere has, in reality, been a collective hope for failure rather than an accurate reporting of it.
Apple’s growth has been tremendous. Partly because of the iPod halo effect and partly because the company has a knack for being able to provide a solid user experience. All of my PCs run Windows, but I only buy Apple notebooks because when I’m sitting on a plane or in a hotel halfway around the world, I want my computer to just work, and my trusty G4 PowerBook hasn’t let me down yet. I’ve seen this trend everywhere– in schools, parks, cafes and coffee shops, there is usually an equal ratio of Apple to non-Apple notebooks.
Open source in general has been an astonishing success and Linux has a commanding share in the server market, but don’t fool yourself. Despite the growing device driver collection, the efforts of the KDE developers to provide real, coherent application development frameworks, and the charitable marketing provided by Canonical, Linux still remains a niche desktop operating system and provides an unpleasant experience for most users. It’s come a long way from the TWM/FVWM days and is certainly improving, but it’s not there yet and it’s not eroding the Windows userbase in any significant number.
That said, show a little bit of respect for Windows. You may not like it or Microsoft, but Windows was the face of the PC revolution. And that is a good thing because any of the alternatives at the time would have left us with one proprietary hardware/OS vendor. Windows may have a lock on the OS world, but at least Gates had the foresight to encourage diversity in hardware. The result is the expansive computing ecosystem that we have today.
I’d agree with everything that you said except the part about Vista “failure” being overhyped only on the blogosphere. The attitude that I see mostly is that people really hate it at first and then just get used to it just like a human being can get used to something truly bad, no matter what. It could be that the entry level computers that are sold with Vista here in Brazil barely meet the minimum specs to run Vista and few people outside geeks see the need to spend lots of cash to purchase more powerful gear. The only people that I know that truly like it are gamers – who usually have a powerful rig and dig the bling – and Microsophiles, with their MCP certifications and the likes.
Some people, like my brother-in-law’s son go out of their way to remove it immediately and replace it with a pirated XP copy: I’ve been called to do it more than once and I know that I’m not the only one doing it.
Personally, I think that it is OK: don’t use it much to be honest and haven’t made any active effort to acquire it – it came with the laptop when I purchased it. But given the specs, I can tell that I am disappointed with its performance. It is not THAT slow, but it surely should do a lot better.
But I can certainly understand where all that frustration comes from If I were permanently stuck with Windows like most people is…
You are of right. But the majority of the users today don’t have real experience with a multitude of operating systems and just some flavor of Windows to do basic stuff at home or to play games. I still think that for those users Windows is perfectly OK. In a professional environment of course, Windows sucks ass – which is also good, because Microsoft’s fails in this environment were always a license to print money. It-Managers who are willing to use Windows on a corporate network level are usually also willing to pay through the nose to get the most basic things done. Like auditing, pen testing, monitoring – and of course replacing one or more mission critical systems with Debian Linux.
In these 25 years another funny thing happened: Users got so used to Windows, especially the younger ones, that today they think that computers are supposed to be exactly like that. There is a lack of sense for quality on the consumer market for operating systems.
Edited 2008-11-12 07:48 UTC
Anyone else run GEM on DRDOS instead of Windows 2 on MSDOS back in the 80’s. I guess I always must have had something against Microsoft, though I must admit I had both on the same system.
Didn’t run GEM, but DR-DOS beat the pants off of MS-DOS and PC-DOS any day. Even when I ran Windows it was DR-DOS that I ran it on top of. MS-DOS was awful by comparison.
That was DR-DOS, and yes.
But I got a lot of use out of GeoWorks Ensemble.
It took Windows 95 OSR2 to push me from my loved OS/2 installation. The better DOS than DOS at the time and could also run Windows 3.x apps, protected!!
But with the release of MS Office 95, and many other software running only on Win95, I switched.
I’m on Windows since then (and Mac OS X), but I remember fondly of my time with OS/2 and still wish it would have won the war. Poor IBM management/marketing killed their own child.
I still use OS/2 from time to time, but my main machine is now a newer box dual-booting between Ubuntu 7.10 and a Puppy variant called VestaPup.
Linux has come a long way, baby. 🙂
As an Amiga user back in the day, I had a friend show me MS Windows. I promptly giggled, said something along the lines of ‘how quaint’, and then went back to my preemptive multitasked system with 4096 colours, a mouse with 2 buttons, and stereo sound.
Back in the late 80’s, all the cool new games and apps were coming for the Amiga. How could Commodore screw the pooch so much? (and yes, I’ve purchased/read “Beyond the Edge”).
*snif*
Yes, and look how your ‘beloved’ Amiga turned out.
What version of Windows did you see, do you remember? My reactions upon using Windows for the first time (Windows 3.1; I was 8 or so then… holy) were along the lines of “Wow! It’s just like the Amiga!”
Microsoft of the late 90s reminds me of Commodore of the late 80s: Really creative, dedicated, and talented people underneath, but being run by people with little technical knowledge.
The only difference was that Commodore’s inept leadership managed to stay around until the early 90s and demand millions from a company that needed those millions to develop actual product, eventually driving them into the ground. Microsoft, on the other hand, had a leader who still understood the business stick around through the turn of the millenium, long enough to clean out some of the deepest wounds and make sure some of the more talented and business-savvy people got promoted.
I think that if Tramiel had stuck around in Commodore, and Gates had retired when he originally planned on it, the fates of the two companies would have been reversed…
Same as the first poster. I had a lowly A500 (later 600) and couldn’t help laughing when i first saw Windows 3.x.
Games were better, graphics and sound were better, everything was better on the Amiga.
My mate had the A1200 with a build in hard drive (ooohhh!!) and it rocked. And we had some great link up games over serial cable…. man those were the days.
Shame a great piece of tech went under. Windows didnt catch up until Win95 and even then it wasnt any better.
Didn’t Win95’s Plug and Play come from licensed Amiga tech?
Maybe it turns 25, but I am turning 25 as well and I abandoned windows few years ago, so frankly said I don`t care for it any longer.
but, congrats and happy birthday! :o)
Lets face it, Windows may be a bad OS technically with lots of design flaws, but it has made a great impact. Therefore, lets cheer for Windows this birthday!
So has the Hiroshima Bomb.
The history of Windows is a history of unfair business conduct, forced upgrades with little to no ROI and the use of downright EVIL methods to keep competition out of the market. Happy Birthday!
Everyone i know really kept to DOS until the release with windows 3 and more importantly 3.1.
Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were pretty dire, especially compared to the competition at the time.
For me the first real Windows to take notice of was Windows 95. It was an excellent OS and ok sometimes it could be a little flakey but it pushed the PC GUI into the modern age. After that Windows 2000 was my next fravourite release. The speed and stability of NT coupled with modern features (such as USB).
Windows XP was just an interium release in my opinion, it didn’t offer that much over windows 2k, however due to support all desktops are WinXP, which is a solid OS.
Windows Vista didn’t really impress with when it was first released, however SP1 + patches later i would say again like XP it’s a solid release with a couple of useful features but nothing of the upgrade that Win2k or Win95 was.
Windows 7, i do have high hopes for, i think Microsoft have got an excellent leader in Sinosky, they are focused on bringing out a solid feature rich release.
Ballmer selling Windows 1.0 on TV. Just U$99,00!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL4hyATkQ74
Happy Birthday Windows.
Yeah… it seems Bill Gates did it. Like it or not, he managed to get Windows being used by many people.
I wonder how long it will stay the dominant Operating System. In my opinion, it’s time for a change.
25 years layer, and it still works like a Beta version.