Screenshot History of Windows

jobugeek writes "Neowin has an article that shows the progression of Microsoft Windows from pre-windows 1.0 through the 2003 server. For those of you who have used all of them, I'm sorry."

Comments

Screenshots are originally from...

[eMartin]

First, many of the screens from the article appear to have been taken from The GUI Gallery, which is kinda lame since it's basically just a copy of that site anyway. The author even says that he "picked them up" from the internet. :P

And second, wasn't this posted here like a week ago?

Re:Screenshots are originally from...

[linebackn]

Yes, many these were taken from my site http://toastytech.com/guis/ Some of them look like they were taken from elsewhere. You can even see my name in the NT 3.51 user manager screen shot. I can't get to all of their site right now since it is mostly slashdotted. I normally don't mind if people use my images or graphics, but I generally ask that they provide reference or a link back to my site.

Official Microsoft Story

[rf0]

You can read the official M$ story of the windows history at microsoft.com
including horrible coloured screenshots :)

Rus

mirror of first 10 pages

[lizzybarham]

here

the "skip to page number" at bottom of pages don't work - you'll need to hit back on your browser

Timelines...

[antdude]

Here's a Windows Timeline list of each MS OS and its date. Also, includes the current future OS'.

Re:NonBloated

[the_cowgod]

Here's the contents of the disks I've got:

Windows 1.01 (files dated November 1985) - 5 360K floppies - 1,598K
Windows 2.03 (November 1987) - 9 360K floppies - 3,540K
Windows 3.0 (October 1990) - 7 720K floppies - 5,423K
Windows for Workgroups v3.11 (November 1993) - 8 1.44MB floppies - 12,215K
Windows 95 v4.00.950 (July 1995) - 34,621K
Windows 95 v4.00.950B (May 1997) - 45,169K

Re:Inaccuracies

[julesh]

Who modded this as informative?

Namely that versions of Windows before Win95 didn't fully support the 386

Win 3 supported every feature of the 386 processor. It could run 32 bit code (although most of the code was 16 bit for compatibility). It could run DOS programs in V86 mode. It supported 4Gb of RAM. That's pretty much every 386 feature accounted for.

despite what the article claims, still had worthless (and error-prone) cooperative multi-tasking

The article claims that DOS tasks where pre-emptively multitasked. This is correct. I thought it was true for 2.0/386 as well, though, but I'm not certain, having never actually used that (I only ever used 2.0 on a 186).

nor did they have anything resembling a 32-bit filesystem.

Win3.1 came with a 32 bit filesystem driver. That is, the driver executed as 32 bit code without thunking to DOS. The articles text is ambiguous, and may cause you to think of FAT32, but it does clearly state later that FAT32 was introduced with Win95 OSR2.

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[x0n]

[flamebait]Since noone here really knows anything about Windows[/flamebait], I'd better answer this one -- on the contrary my friend, you _do_ have several logs of the event (details for default install of win2000):

- An event notification in the NT Event Log

- A carbon copy of the bluescreen data at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\DrWatson\

- System crash dump (choice of small/kernel/complete) at %systemroot%\memory.dmp

- user process space dump at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\DrWatson\user.dmp

Run drwtsn32.exe to see some of these options, additionally, right-click my computer, advanced tab, startup and recovery options.

Additionally, Windows does not have "automatically reboot" enabled by default. Either you or your administrator chose to enable that behaviour.

Enough of the "bah, windows 2000 doesn't do this, nor that" banter. RTFM (yes, I know there is no manual, F1 it mate) or, ATFM "ask the f*ing adminstrator". :)

- Oisin

kind of true

[DrSkwid]

AT&T licensed Unix to OEMs and Microsoft decided to be one of them.

Bill was a Xenix evangelist, even putting it on the desks of the secretaries if the stories are true.

See here

and here

A Snippet of his 1996 speech at Unix Expo

One of the exciting things we're announcing today is that our commitment to the Internet and to building a state-of-the-art browser extends not only to Windows 95 and Windows NT, but also to 16-bit Windows and the Macintosh and to Unix. And so, working with some partners, we've created Internet Explorer 3.0, and that's our latest, with all the active control capabilities on several Unix platforms.

Re:Progression

[default luser]

Actually, you're forgetting some of the most important aspects that Windows 95 brought to the world.

Plug 'n Play - Nod to OS/2 for having the same feature, but Win95 is responsible for bringing it to the masses. There were, as expected, a few bugs, but in most cases the hardware was properly detected and configured without the user lifting a finger. Think of Win95 as the working, but basic PnP, whereas Windows 2k / XP with ACPI are the best it ever needs to be.

Built-in easy networking (IPX/TCP/Etc.) -
Come on folks. Linux was a pain in the ass for years to configure to talk to anything, unless you already knew how. In Windows, it was as simple as opening an applet, and selecting the protocol / service. Better still, most Dialup / Network adapters AUTOMATICALLY installed the protocols and services you needed, so no user interaction necessary.

No, it wasn't perfect. But time doesn't stand still, and in terms of features Win95 was an excellent starting point for things to come. Both features mentioned above ( simple networking, PnP ) have been nearly perfected in 2k/XP.