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

Progression

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been no real revolution since win95... just evolution. Will revolution happen anytime soon?

Re:Progression

[kfg]

Hammers haven't changed much since the days of Thor, although they've evolved a bit.

They still bust heads better than just about anything. Lack of revolution just might be a *good* thing.

The great thing about computers though, especially one running Linux, is that it's fairly easy ( in the comparitive sense) for anybody who has a better idea to impliment it.

Have you thought up the new, revolutionary interface that will sweep everything else away before it?

Neither have I, so that's ok. Neither has anybody else.

There a few competing graphical interfaces, and a few command line interfaces, that pretty much seem to cover the bases of people's preferences, and they all approach optimum to one degree or another and direct mind control is still science fiction.

Get used to it. It's going to be like this for a while.

KFG

Re:Progression

[Xrikcus]

on the other hand the changes between XP and 2k (which it evolved from) are tiny

Re:Man... what a garbage it was (like 1, 2, and 3)

[Frobnicator]

Man... what a garbage it was. I'm making some product right now and I'm in charge. Also It's much better (looking) than Win1, 2, and 3. I must be able to tons of money over next 10 years.

For the time it was high-end. Nobody had 256 color displays, you were getting 'high end' EGA cards with 32 colors, and 256 colors was available for several thousand bucks. Your high-end machines were 32-bit and aproaching 33 Mhz, with 32-mb of disk space and, if you were rich, had 16 MB of RAM. A more common scenario was a 16-bit machine with a 20-mb hard disk, 12 or 16 Mhz, and up 2 MB of ram.

If you make make your app run nicely on that configuration, then have 15 years of development for improvement, then you might have something.

Re:NonBloated

[Unreal One]

hehe I love Linux, but getting 2 web servers, 3 rdbms, 6 text editors, 2 GUI's, 3 mail readers, etc. is a bit unnecessary. Standardize for God's sake... Each distro should have a vote on their site for the best of each app to distribute with their package, and write it, nice and tight into their distro. All the other crap can still be downloaded, so it's still okay. Whatever. Just a thought.

Re:The lies prepetuated

[steveha]

Windows 9x is still DOS with a quick switch over to the graphical shell.

That's true, but for the time it was the right thing.

You could run Win95, and do useful work with it, on a PC with 4 MB of RAM. More was better; I ran it with 8 MB. (In 1995, RAM was expensive!)

Part of the reason it was small was because of the stupid thunking into DOS. DOS is small, partly because it started out small and partly because lots of people hacked on it over the years trying to keep it small. (DOS 4 was an exception, but the MS DOS guys were quick to point out that IBM made DOS 4. DOS 5, done by MS, was actually smaller than DOS 4, despite having many improvements.)

Also, Win95 had lots of 16-bit code inherited from Win 3.1, and it thunked into that a lot. Again, this contributed to the small size.

I'm glad that machines are so powerful these days, where 128 MB of RAM is considered a small amount. But part of Win95's success was that it actually ran on the machines of the day.

steveha

So easy to bash the past...

[rufusdufus]

Why back in the middle ages get this..they used swords! Those fools! Why didn't they just use guns!

Programmers today have no clue what programming was like back in the early days of the PC. The system had to boot in 64k, which is equivilant to a few icons in todays world. The graphics technology was so primitive most programmers today would refuse to write code for it; the pixels weren't square and there was no screen read!

Yet the functionality was substantially similar to what we have today; networking, graphics, spreadsheets, word processors with fonts.

Put down the early days of windows all you want, twenty years from now you will be defending the "boneheaded code" you wrote in your youth and you may just get a taste of it; though not the full course meal since starting a billion dollar enterprise is much much more difficult than coat-tailing on one.

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[ayjay29]

Enjoy your joke while you can.

Your going to to mention "Blue Screen" one day and no one will know what you are talking about. I have not seen one for over a year now, as the releases progress, Windows is getting more stable. You have to find a different way to poke fun at the man-in-the-glasses.

Ayjay...

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

You have to find a different way to poke fun at the man-in-the-glasses.

I'm sure I'll be laughing from my Mac when a virus is released that exploits a hole in MSs' DRM system and makes it so you can't back up you own files. he he he.

in response to your automatic windows zeal

[dpete4552]

There are zealots everywhere. On Neowin you'll find your fair share of Microsoft zealots, on Slashdot you'll find your fair share of Anti-Microsoft zealots, on an Apple website you'd find your fair share of Apple zealots, etc...

People have their views. Sometimes people's views are based upon a line of logic that that person happens to agree with, and a lot of times people's views are based on other things. The people in the latter category are ignorant. You will find these groups of people everywhere. There is really nothing you can do about it. So I would suggest that you simply get used to it or you are going to have a very hard time in life.

Even you yourself appear to be quite ignorant. This is not necessarily an insult, as I am not attempting to challenge your intelligence. But based upon a lot of comments you made in your post you are very uninformed. Although your last comment pushes you into the arrogant (ignorance mixed with ego) category imho. My purpose in saying this is not to flame bit, but to show you that even you express zealousness. So you might want to be a bit more tolerant when you see others expressing that same quality, or you might come across as a hypocrite to some.

Re:silly remark

[_Spirit]

So XP professional (NT 5.1 as it identifies itself) wasn't meant to replace 2000 Professional (NT 5)? And I suppose 2003 won't replace the 2000 server versions.....

Silly remark indeed.

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[TopShelf]

I never understood why they default to auto-reboot. It smacks of arrogance that says, "this couldn't possibly happen again, we'll have your OS back up and running in no time."