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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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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!
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?
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...
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.
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
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 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.
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)
You can read the official M$ story of the windows history at microsoft.com :)
including horrible coloured screenshots
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
here
the "skip to page number" at bottom of pages don't work - you'll need to hit back on your browser
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
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]
Nonsense. Hammers aren't a bit like they were in Thor's day. Thor's hammer was able to fly and respond to commands, whereas all today's junk can do is hit things.
Pah. They don't make 'em like they used to...
Cheers,
Ian
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.
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.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.