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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."
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There's been no real revolution since win95... just evolution. Will revolution happen anytime soon?
did anyone ever hyndai or whatever computers? they were only released as an experiment to see how well they worked.. they were cheap as heck and they planned on giving them to school. they could only handle this bad wordprocessing program, "wordstar"
windows user interface has ALWAYS been prettier than that. even if it always has been pretty damned ugly.
You don't appreciate how ugly the standard Windows colors are without this kind of perspective.
What they need is a history of windows blue screens....and photos of frustrated 4th year students who lose 3 hours worth of work, 2 hours before there final papers are due.
You know who you are!
Wordstar was bad?
That was a great program that started many of the flag based text editing programs to date. All of the commands were at the bottom of the screen and it was relatively easy to use. I really thought that was a good program.
Hey, at least the bloat hadn't yet set in. I have a few versions of Windows archived away here just because they don't take up too much room.
Win 1.0 is a 244k zip file.
Win 2.0 really went overkill and that's where the bloat set in I'm afraid. 667kb. What do people need all that for anyway?
Ignoring the fact I made this (mod it down if that's a problem - I don't mind) I think they missed one of the screen shots of early windows -
:D
A never released version of windows*
*of maybe it was - you decide
My blog [.net, rants, general IT]
looking at all of them one thing really
strikes you, win95 was quite a leap.
till then it really was not close to
a usable desktop. win95 was the racehorse...
You may call it slashdotting, but I say BLAME WINDOWS!
(Or perhaps it was just emulating the slow release process of Win -95)
All opinions are my own - until criticized
"For those of you who have used all of them, I'm sorry." Has it ever dawned to you that some people actually like using Windows??? Not everyone is a Microsoft bashing Linux freak like you Michael.
22 comments on the story, and the site is already experiencing the full force of the /. effect. I wonder what OS that server's running? Oh. Well, that blows my theory out of the water.
You know, this was a lot funnier BEFORE I went to netcraft.
I was using OS/2 during that whole sordid Windows thing. Sure I've seen Windows, but I never inhaled. I never saw the point in Windows; still don't. I'll admit to exchanging blow jobs with some of my buddies when I was 14, but I'll never admit to using any MS product except NT4 at work ( unplesent duty, that).
In regards to windows 1.0:
It took 55 programmers one year to develop this program.
And 500 slashdotters 20 minutes to overload neowin's server looking at screenshots of an OS we all supposedly loath . . .
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?
If you make make your app run nicely on that configuration, then have 15 years of development for improvement, then you might have something.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
From the Netcraft link:
mod_bwlimited/1.0 PHP/4.3.1
Looks like it's working perfectly. They probably have to pay through the nose to their hosting company if throughput exceeds some arbitrary limit.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
If you have your old copy of Windows 95 System Programming Secrets (1995, Matt Pietrek) handy, he has some examples of how those pesky Int 21 calls (DOS services) are still thunked down to that crappy old DOS layer, instead of being completely handled in the kernal, as in WinNT. If there was truely no DOS, there would be no thunking, no crappy DOS layer, and no MSDOS.SYS/IO.SYS/COMMAND.COM garbage.
Microsoft's marketing machine tried (and mostly managed) to convince the world that 'DOS is dead' with this version of Windows. Rumor has it that BillG got totally hacked off by an Apple commerical that compared booting a Mac with booting a WIntel box, and told his minions that the next version (95) better boot right to Windows.
Yeah, right.
The first time I was introduced to Windows, I was using a Tandy 1000RLX. For those of you who didn't follow the history of Tandy's 1000 series, it basically started with the original 1000 and went something like this... RGEG@#3t232tG@#g@#G23#%#@^!@^grsg
Yea, that's about as much sense as it made - the 1000 moniker was absolutely useless for determining what kind of system it was. So anyway, as it turns out, the 1000RLX was an XT-286. Yep, while other 286s had a 16-bit bus and 16-bit ISA slots... My crappy Tandy didn't. What it did have was a 10MHz AMD 286 chip on an 8-bit bus with 256k VGA graphics, 1MB of RAM, a 1.44MB floppy drive and an XT-IDE 40MB hard drive. It also had one 8-bit ISA slot that I decided to cram a 2400bps modem into.
So anyway, I certainly didn't have the hardware for Windows 3.0 and while I don't remember the exact date, I do remember Windows 3.1 was just about to come out in a few months... So it was back in the day. I got ahold of a copy of Windows 3.0 and installed it on that Tandy and guess what - my mouse didn't work.
I called tech support (you could actually reach a live person back in the day!) for the Tandy computer... They kinda wondered where I got a copy of Windows from (since the computer didn't come with it, it came with Tandy's Deskmate) but instead of telling me "No, we don't support operating systems that didn't come bundled... blah blah blah" like you'd expect to hear today - they were actually helpful and explained that this XT-286 had the PS/2 mouse port on a non standard IRQ and I'd need to get a serial mouse.
To make a long story longer, I waited awhile for 3.1 to be released and ended up pawning off the computer on my father and convinced him to buy me a Tandy 2500SX/25 instead... So not only could I run the new Windows 3.1 with a mouse, I also could run it in 386 protected mode with a whopping 2MB of ram and an 80MB hard drive. From what I remember of Windows 3.1, it was always very slow and it seemed to crash a lot and every few weeks or so it managed to crash badly enough to corrupt itself. Blue screens nowadays make me feel all nolstalgic.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I think it's quite telling that for several years the biggest-selling and most popular application for Windows was what?
A screen saver! (After Dark)
Didn't see your comment, so I posted below.
The screens are from The GUI Gallery, and the author even says he "picked them up" from the net.
You can read the official M$ story of the windows history at microsoft.com :)
including horrible coloured screenshots
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
right when I started there was a whole pile of software boxen in the hallway. My manager told me that I could take whatever I wanted. So I looked around and found really early versions of Windows and DOS. I thought it was cool and so I took em home. Then one day after perhaps one too many evenings of Linux hacking I was cleaning up my room... you guessed it, out they went. I have to admit, I regret that a bit...
Sure. Take a square. Make it just a tad darker than sky blue. Now put a grey bar at the bottom, with a crappy logo on the left and the word Start. (remember, you have to Start before you can Shut Down)
You will also notice a funny-looking lower-case 'e' somewhere. This is special software for your computer. Very special. Time-warp forward about three months. The blue square is now an annoying set of green tiles with gold trim, or a wierdly-distorted picture of someone's wife and kids. But it doesn't really matter because just about all you can see are random icons scattered haphazardly all over the place. Most of them came as a result of the funny 'e' software, and they are named things like "pics.scr" and "Brittney_SPears.mp3.exe. None of them do anything when you click on them, so you naturally download another to see if you can make that one work, too. But I digress...
Pretty much, that's the look of the thing after 3.1, at least until XP. To get a picture of XP in your head, you first have to be familiar with the gumdrop look of Mac OS X, which came before XP. Then, while holding the OS X desktop in your mind, send in some Tellytubbies, and have them run around, say gibberish, point to their belly buttons, and while they're at it, customize the desktop and control buttons very slightly to suit their own, um, needs. That's Windows XP, in a nutshell.
The preceeding comments were brought to you by the letter G and the Number 3.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I haven't used MS-Windows/MS-Office in years and I still have the reflex to hit Ctrl-S at the end of each sentence or any time I pause for a moment while typing.
Usually, I catch it in time to abstract it to "Save" and use the correct short cut. But being a reflex it unfortunately still kicks in sometimes as Ctrl-S ... even in Bash or vi.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Ah, the days before bloat.
here
the "skip to page number" at bottom of pages don't work - you'll need to hit back on your browser
What about us poor schmucks who have to keep our programs compatible to the 95/98/Me family, while still integrating a "modern XP look" (blech) for marketing? Don't we get some sympathy?
Microsoft Layer for Unicode, here I come...
That said, did anyone else have a Tandy 1000, or specifically the 1000/TL? It was actually pretty sharp back in the day, and may have been the last custom computer Radio Scrap offered. It had the operating system (older version of MS-DOS, I forget which one) in ROM on the D drive, so it booted insanely fast. It also came with some windows/office kind of software called Deskmate, which sort of resembled Windows 1.0. It was a desktop environment with a word processor and some other stuff, which was graphic-based, but the text was the same size/font as the standard IBM-PC text at 80x25 character resolution. Anybody else besides me ever use that? I don't remember anything else about it, though.
make world, not war
Here's a Windows Timeline list of each MS OS and its date. Also, includes the current future OS'.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
the end.
just kidding, actually my father reinstalled the system, and eventually we got it working.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
Actually, if you go to start->run->services.msc and enable the Themes service then reboot, it lets you select the luna themes again.
;)
Just when you thought m$ cut down on the bloat, you find out it's still there
This article seems to have some inaccuracies.
Namely that versions of Windows before Win95 didn't fully support the 386 (dunno 'bout NT, never used it), despite what the article claims, still had worthless (and error-prone) cooperative multi-tasking, nor did they have anything resembling a 32-bit filesystem. FAT32, Microsoft's 32-bit file system, didn't come along until Windows 95; prior to that they had FAT16.
Additionally, starting with the 286 you could have more than 640k of RAM. The 286, IIRC, had a 24-bit address space and could therefor address up to 16 megabytes when running in 16-bit protected mode, but even in its protected mode still suffered from the horrid segmentation model that so annoyed programmers writing software for Intel's earlier x86 CPUs. Intel's poor segmentation system didn't become a thing of the past (or at least something you could ignore) until the 386 and its 32-bit protected mode.
"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"
Some of us were using AmigaDOS or RISC OS and had 32bit machines, thousands or millions of colours and decent sound support all for a reasonable price. 80's PCs were crap!
This is the first time I actually noticed the dates on all this software.
Back in the late-eighties/early-nineties I only knew Macs. I had family that worked at Apple so I had access to a lot of stuff. I finally moved over to a PC in 1998, when I got tired of connecting to shell accounts and wanted to get my own unix machine.
Anyway, I can't believe the dates here. I always assumed that Windows 3.1 came out in 87/88, what with the horrible interface and lack of features. I remember playing with a Mac 128k in 1985 that worked better than 3.1, minus the color.
It really makes me wonder what they were thinking at Apple back then, making the machines so expensive rather than trying to take over the market when they had such a lead. It boggles the mind.
[insert witty quote here]
The 32-bit operating system also offered enhanced multimedia capabilities, more powerful features for mobile computing, and integrated networking
I think the author pulled this straight out of Microsoft's propaganda. I don't know what qualify Windows 95 as a 32-bit OS.
Windows 95 cannot perform preemptive multitasking when 16-bit applications are running. Therefore if you plan to use mostly older 16-bit applications, you should not expect to see productivity improvements. There are also times when Windows 95 cannot multitask 32-bit applications. Windows 95 uses older 16-bit code for two very important modules( Window management and Graphics Device Interface). When an application needs to use these modules, they have to wait in line until the previous application gives up control, the operating system cannot preempt it. If a 32-bit application needs to use one of these two modules, it may have to wait for it. That application is not able to multitask while it waits. In addition, 16-bit applications can inhibit the multitasking related performance of the 32-bit applications. When you run a mix of 16-bit and 32-bit applications, Windows 95 resorts to a less sophisticated form of multitasking called cooperative multitasking.
You see, 'pure 32-bit OS mode' will never happen.
with over 90% of PC users choosing to adopt this software
Heh, well, if having it violently shoved onto your future computer by its manufacturer...
Or if having to pirate a copy because you can't afford it and for some God-awful reason you need to hone your l337 haxor sk177Z on it because UNIX is just too easy...
Of if you actually bought it because a winmodem is your only ticket online. If that all in some convoluted way constitutes choice, then yes, we "adopted" Windows.
Jobugeek wrote: "For those of you who have used all of them, I'm sorry." Why? I have produced a lot of stuff using Windows? I don't think Windows is _that_ bad even if I mostly use Linux today.
Also, there has been a lot of sarcasms in the previous posts regarding the slashdotted site. But checking with www.netcraft.com one sees their server's setup:
"The site www.neowin.net is running Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_log_bytes/1.0 mod_bwlimited/1.0 PHP/4.3.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.7 on Linux."
The fact that manufacturers spend the time to make drivers for Windows is not a reflection of the quality of Windows itself.
Plus, you could just compile all the kernel modules at once instead of having to recompile when you change your setup. That's effectively what Windows does.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Correct, and because of this feature (about all kernals being compiled) being used by DEFAULT, which is easier? (to Joe Public)
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.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
Hiya!
Didn't get a chance to see the pictures, server is slashdotted. So I did a quick googling around and found a nice site that shows the history of the AmigaOS. http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/index.html
I had forgot just how nasty Workbench 1.x's colours where. Makes XP look friendly *g*
Novell was an evil mistress back than, it was like the mature lady down the street propogating herpes to every yound lad willing and able.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Also note on the Windows Server 2003 page they talk about the release like it already happened. They say it was release on 24 April 2003. Do they have a time machine? It's still March here. They also say that Server 2003 was the best MS OS ever. How can they know?
"For those of you who have used all of them, I'm sorry."
Errr, why? Not half as sorry as I feel for those who've used X11 since the beginning. Ever got stuck with TWM or FVMW (feeble virtual window manager) or OpenLook? They give me the shudders just thinking of them! FVWM even had a Win95 look on my Slackware distro back in the mid-90's. The difference between them is that you're increasingly unlikely to see older Windows UIs, yet the crap old X11 ones are still active today. My XFree86 under Windows/Cygwin comes with TWM, and I had to suffer TWM on my Linux box the other day when I was compiling a newer version of KDE. Ugh!
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.
beauty is only a light switch away
When I was at University, in the mid 80s, windowing systems were the real high end, final year undergraduate student stuff. Much as I hate the beast, I think it does deserve some credit for Windows 3.0 and 3.1 which really did take this stuff out to the masses.
I really had to fight my then employers to go for Windows in the mid-90s (we were still using DOS and Wordperfect) and the benefits of the switch were real and immediate. Back then Linux was for geeks (:->) and nothing else was really a serious, low cost option for mass roll out on cheap hardware.
That's all changed now, of course.
Here's a fun game to play - think of all the aftermarket 'fixes' for Winblow$ and the marketing metaphore. For example:
1) First Aid - Windows is a sick person hemorraging blood and needs 'first aid' while waiting for the 'doctor' or ambulance. It is also succeptible to 'viruses' and diseases. Adherents to this metaphone often say, "My computer is sick!"
2) Oil Change - Windows is an automobile that need regular perodic 'maintenance', as if there were metal parts in there rubbing together and need lubricant. They also often need a cheap muffler, tire rotation, etc. See Also "Tune Up". Adherents to this metaphone say their computer is "In the shop" being repaired, or "Hey Jim! Put 'er up on the rack again - the transmission's still acting up!".
3) Power Tools - Windows is a decrepit old house that just needs a little 'fixing up' and 'sweat equity' to fix the drafty windows, broken stair steps, etc. This metaphore suggests a 'do it yourself' person more willing to tinker with their system than the Sick Human or Broken Automobile metaphore, who must call a Dr. or mechanic. But sometimes users of 'power tools' just make things worse and have to call in a 'contractor' to reinstall a whole new house.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Blue screen of birth
Blue screen of death
It used preemptive multitasking for MS-DOS apps, because there would be no other way. For everything else, though, it did cooperative multitasking.
Warp 4 was released in 1996 - any copying (window close buttons, start menu, taskbar, etc) was by OS/2 off Win95 (for which MS copied of many other products as well, but Win95 was before Warp4)
Warp3 was more Win3.x-ish.
You must be kidding right. I only wish I had a version installed so I could show a screenshot.
Warp 4 certainly had many design elements of Windows 95, but they were ONLY a start bar type fthing and the X buttons. Those features were available years before in circa 1993 as freeware add-ons. Checkout Filebar and NPS WPS enhancer, from which MS primarily ripped their design concepts.
Many of the core ways that OS/2 worked were ripped from OS/2. A consistently gray GUI provided a much better look and was easier on the eyes. Buttons and bars had the "chiseled" look. MS even ripped the dark green background of OS/2 Warp 3.0. IBM did a whole study and determined that color calms humans better than any other. Lets not forget the absolutely revolutionary tabbed properties dialogue boxes.
OS/2 always had a desktop since 1992, three years before Windows 95. There was no true desktop in Windows prior to 1995.
In reality, the Macintosh had many of these features first. It was always striking how Windows 95 looked so incredibly similar to OS/2 Warp 3. They could easily have incorporated many of the design elements but still have created a unique look.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
http://toastytech.com/guis/win101disk.zip
Runs nicely in VMWARE.
It must not be taken out of context
I had Gem on my 8088 (512K, 30Mb HDD) and had a funky graphics card that would do CGA hi-res in 16 colours. So Gem was nice and colourful (though fixed windows, unlike atari Gem).
With first Word Plus and Timeworks DTP, the machine was excellent for doing schoolwork and stuff.
Now this PC I got also came with 2 operating systems, MS-DOS 3.2 and DOS Plus - Due to software compatibility, I tended to use MS-DOS, dos plus was slightly more memory hungry. I made the choice to use MS-DOS because it *was* a better operating system.
I remember windows 2 coming out and being quite excited - I remember starting it up - waiting ages - running in monochrome (it didn't support my weird graphics card) and played othello for about 30 minutes and then uninstalled it. My opinion: windows is a flop. (DOS is still good though!)
I used Windows 3.0 on some machine or other (not mine) and thought that it was a big improvement on 2.0.
I then got my 486 (33MHz w/ 8mb ram) with windows 3.1 installed! Oh-My-God it was *so* good, people talk about the shortcomings, but they either didn't use win3.1 or didn't have powerful enough machines to appreciate it properly.
There were 1 million hacks available for win3.1 to do whatever you wanted (icons on the desktop etc.) and it was skinnable too.
The underlying technology didn't really matter to me, I still played my DOS games in DOS and ran windows when I wanted to do something like use Word - remember word 2 folks? It's almost the same as the current word that we use today - all the elements were in place and it took first place on my machine.
I played with a couple of linux distros around that time or just after (Slackware and a thing called mini-linux that I've never found any references to again). But they just couldn't compete for a desktop experience for me and they didn't run doom!
Nowadays I run mandrake linux on my pc and debian (knoppix) on my laptop because I feel it's time has come.
Look on those old windows shots with the pleasant nostalgia they are intended to invoke. Suppress the anti-M$ urge on this one!
Truly KFG, you chose the right analogy, but to the wrong conclusion. You presumed that hammers have not transformed suddenly, and this presumption lead you to conclude by similarity that current MMI will not undergo another shocking tranformation. The question depends upon whether you believe the MMI is in a state of stasis or flux - you vote for stasis? Consider your analogy to the hammer:
Think! Hammers haven't changed much since the days of Thor? Simply untrue!
Basic engineering has given you a far better hammer than your pre-historic and Roman-era ancestors. Materials science has given you a longer lasting hammer and a shock-resistant grip. Ergonomics have saved callusses on your palm. Hammers are no longer powered only by the muscle of your arms, but via chemical reactions, pneumatics, hydraulics, magnetics or springs. The "interface" is no longer only a bar of wood, but a simple release trigger, or sculpted plastic, and padded rubber. Moreover, hammers no longer pound target nails only through wood, but through metal and concrete as well.
Think. All of those advances in the art and science of hammering have occured during the last 100 years! From the perspective of the 6000 year recorded history of the hammer; the evolution of the hammer into the modern form was rather sudden - in archeological terms: a catastrophic revolution. Thor's prototypical hammer is now a shameful implement - long since been relegated to the bargain bin of history.
Will the WIMP metaphor eventually slide into disrepute? All that is required for advance is that we apply the new technologies that we develop or discover to the MMI. We needn't jump to science fiction and direct mind control or any such imaginings: speech interfaces will occur much sooner, as will true adaptive handwriting recognition, not to mention visual and socially cued interfaces. When one of these both reaches fruition and finally clicks with the public, we will have yet another revolution, which will be as profound as the one that brought us WIMP.
Will it occur in my lifetime, which is already over 3/4 done? No, but mark these words: those changes will come to fruition in the lifetime of a teener geek reading this. The revolution of a tool only ends when no-one asks "Will revolution happen anytime soon?", which is the necessary precursor to the demand, "I must change this." People are still asking, and thus change will continue.
Revolution isn't done with MMI yet.
One good source of information is to go back in your back issues of BYTE mag. circa 1981-83 (until the Apple Lisa came out). You do see that Bill's vision was to have a Multiplan-like UI, that nothing was really graphical.
Unless I'm mistaken (do realize it's been close to 20 years), things changed completely when Apple showed him their work for the Lisa and then the Macintosh. Only then did the microserfs go graphical.
It was not only M$ that did not grok the "graphical" thing: IBM's TopView was also essentially character-based.
But back to my main point: for more info on this, go to those used book stores, your uncle's/father's/older brother's collection of BYTE, Creative Computing and similar magazines of the early '80s and read through them. You'll be amazed what you'll find.
which could be very harmful
cut - save - crash
omg where's my work, it was there when I saved it
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
Not a silly remark at all. Microsoft is not aggresively selling Windows XP as a replacement to Windows 2000. Rather they are selling it as the upgrade path to the consumer line (which is the 9x series, Windows ME) and as an upgrade to Windows NT 4.0. If you wanted to upgrade Windows 2000 to Windows XP Microsoft won't stop you but it's not the market that they are aggressively seeking.
Likewise Windows 2003 Server is not being touted as a serious upgrade to Windows 2000 Server. A good deal of the enhancements to Windows 2003 Server specifically address concerns when upgrading from Windows NT 4.0. Microsoft is not pushing this server heavily as a replacement to Windows 2000 Server.
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.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Remember the old phrase "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission"? Well, it seems Win2k just coded it. :P
I'm convinced the Solitare game is rigged... it's WAY too easy to win as compared to 'real life' Solitaire. I believe Microsoft 'stacks the deck' and makes Solitaire easy to win because lots of people learn mousing skills and have their first experiences with Windows through the Solitaire game. More frequent wins than real life means pleasant newbie experiences with Windows, giving the newbie the warm and fuzzies and good Windows feelings.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs