Slashdot Mirror
20th Anniversary of Windows
UltimaGuy writes "When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Now, it's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide. Take a look at Window's past and present, and what lies ahead in the future, including an interview with Mr. Bill Gates himself."
"When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party,"
Okay.....so how is it any different today? Viruses/spyware and/or anti-virus/spyware software continually slow it down, and all that Microsoft seems to do lately is copy the innovative things that its rivals do, so its still always late to the party.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders
So, nothing has changed then!
Ugh. 20-odd pages, each with only three paragraphs of text? Massive great ads in the middle of the text? Seems like just a glorified way of getting more adverts seen. I'll pass, thanks.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Don't worry. The comments will more than make up for it.
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
After using GNU/Linux for three years, it was kind of a relieve to return back to Windows. I still use tools like emacs, gimp, gcc, latex, etc. But Windows is very stable now, and it supports all the hardware you can throw at it. Now I don't have to sit for days at end trying to get my TV tuner, printer, etc. to work.
I always thought MS biggest coup was not producing a graphical interface(others were doing far better ones at the time) but convincing companies like lotus to port there applications to it.
I bet the discussion did not go like "if you port lotus 1-2-3 to our new graphical interface and help make it popular, in a few years time we will use our position to write a competing app and wipe you off the mat."
I bet the head of lotus wished he had negotiated a non-compete clause.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
IMO Microsoft made computing cheap (as in $) well before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye. And MS still makes computing cheap relative to all other commercial offerings.
SUN and Apple had the world by the tail in those days (mid 80's), but they never worked to commoditize themselves (despite what they tell you its a good thing). Rather SUN, with its hubris laden leadership thought they were so great that only universities and large conglomerates were entitled use their software and hardware; a fact reflected in their price list. And look were its gotten them... McNeally - "I could've been a contender!"
An argument could even be made that Microsoft with its relatively low priced OS is what made the business model that created Linux. The only way to compete with cheap (as in $) is free (as in beer).
With 20 years and 95% market share they had the time, money and resources to create the most advanced operating system ever. Instead, all they ever produced was "good enough" - never on the leading edge, never innovative.
What good have they done? They made the PC a commodity, accessible to all but the most poor. Gone are the days of $7000 proprietary machines that didn't operate with other different computers. These are all good things but they came as a result of market share and fate rather than purposeful design and innovation.
I look back at the last 20 years of Windows and say - what a waste. What a colossal monument to greed and complacency.
More lies about:
1. security;
2. efficiency;
3. non-draconian DRM;
4. interoperability;
5. openness;
6. standards compliance;
7. release dates;
I hope in 5 or 6 years time the Windows anniversary will be about "the year MS lost its monopoly".
Disclosure: I'm stupid
First, windows is getting better, but it sure seems like a slow grind.
More importantly, there is another thing that is not changing. The Wall Street Journal has an article today that confirms its previous reports of Google in talks with Time-Warner about giving them money to prop up AOL.
Nothing has changed. Every time a potential challenger to MS pops up, the challenger kills itself off through its own hubris. Once again, the folks at MS sit in Redmond and laugh all the way to the bank while Google is throwing its money away. Intense focus on small incremental changes for MS has turned them into a money making machine.
If you can compile it, it will run.
Of course, that's a pretty big if.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I used to get really exited about Windows. Betas of Windows 98 and NT 4 at home, Systernals tools, things like TweakUI, an NT 4 era MCSE, caring about the differences between Windows 95 OSR2 and OSR1, etc.
...what? A crap web browser, an IM that only does MSN (Linux does AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, and Jabber, aka Google), a crap mail client (compared to Evolution - check hotwayd if you need to check Hotmail), OpenOffice 2 (yeah, I think OO 1 was crap too) a good firewall out of the box, no spyware hassles, and the ability to install and upgrade my apps/hardware without rebooting for every single one, over and over again. Sure, you could install all this stuff in Windows, but you have to find it and pay for it and reboot and reboot and reboot. If Linux fucks up, all the config files are documented and I can fix it. There's even useful shit like strace in the OS. If Windows fucks up, most of the registry isn't documented and Systernals tools are expensive as hell.
I kinda stopped being interested shortly after Windows 2000. What happened? Well nothing. Before Windows 2000, you had Windows 98, which was unstable, and Windows NT 4, which was a bastard to use (in particular, it had no Plug and Play support).
Then there was Windows 2000, and it was more stable and still easy to use.
Windows XP could hav been a Windows 2000 service pack. A better themable UI, a minor IE update, some utilities to do things like registry snapshots that were useful, but always available as cheap third party tools. No big deal. XP SP 2 was the same, except the firewall was so bad you still needed a third party firewall. And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.
There have been no significant improvements since Windows 2000. Meanwhile, about 1998, I saw a screenshot of Enlightenment. I wanted Enlightenment. Linux came with the bargain. Linux was tweakable to my hearts content. And also really difficult. And I'd use it for a little while,. then mess it up or find something I couldn't do, then go back to Windows.
The thing is, Linux seemed to be improving. Things that seemed to buy me about Linux were bugging other people too. I went from Red Hat 5.2 to Mandrake, which had a nicer GUI, KDE. Then Red Hat 6 came out, and it had KDE plus a simpler GUI installer. Woo. And tools to notice new hardware and configure it. And I started learning about Linux, cause it was nice and tweakable and interesting.
After a while, I'd want to do something in Linux I couldn't do in Windows. First it was pull down sequences of files using wget. In Windows you'd need to fetch and install some trialware crap to do that, and Linux came with the tool. Then it was use Evolution. Then I found smssend, which was cool as hell. Meanwhile, Gnome got quite decent, so I switched to that. These days, Windows has
Meanwhile, I and my Linux buddies had finished Grand Theft Auto on the PS2 while most of my remaining Windows using mates were waiting for it to be released.
And commiserate the rest of the world on their failure :-(
Someone insert some witty windows-creaks-like-an-old-person comment.
Windows is not old. UNIX is old, and behaves as many older people do, working calmly and quietly in the background, running everything.
Windows is 20 years of age, and like most 20-year olds, is annoying, unable to multi-task well, and thinks the world revolves around it.
The operating system behind the e-commerce everyone uses is Windows? Wow. That IS quite a target.
Just goes to show....
You build a better mouse trap.... and some stinking Harvard MBA dropout will steal it, make a bad copy and sell it for a lot less!!
I would NOT describe Windows as open.
I still remember Bill Gates whiny little letter in Byte magazine. He's the richest man in the world by far and Microsoft is the least innovative, most reactive corporation on the planet.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm sure it would be there, and it basically would be Linux. It just wouldn't compete with Windows, but maybe with an OS based on GEM (remember, originally Windows also just was a GUI on top of DOS), or with MacOS, or maybe with some OS which doesn't even exist in our world but would have been written if Windows had not existed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I hope you do realize that there's a difference between "spyware", "virus" and "worm". Hint: "spyware" is usually installed with the user's unknowing "consent". E.g., I can assure you that all the buggers who got Claria/Gator on their computer, didn't get it via ActiveX, but got it buried in some other piece of software's installer (e.g., even DivX helpfully offered a variant with Gator) and usually barely mentioned on page 27 of a 50 page EULA.
/home/joe for example. If he installs that cutesy toolbar as non-root, that's all I need to steal (and if I'm malicious: destroy) all his data.
So if I offered some spyware as some super-duper Mozilla toolbar instead of an IE toolbar... how would the Unix architecture prevent Joe Clueless from installing it? No, seriously.
Even if my hypothetical malware needed root access to really do the dirty deed, want to bet that a simple "You need administrator (root) rights to install this software" would get 90% of the Joe Clueless population to dutifully su and try again? What advice have you given Joe? "Only run as root when you install stuff", maybe? Well, he'll do just that: run as root to install my stuff.
Would that make Joe suspicious? Chances are, it won't. But if I really were worried about that, I'd wrap it neatly in something that looks legit enough in its need to be installed as root. E.g., as a driver. "Our patented InternetAccelerator (TM) drivers use special compression to double your internet's speed!" Watch a batch of Joes rush to install it. "Or EvidenceEliminator (TM) drivers act as a low level gateway, ensuring that none of your porn surfing habits are even written on the hard drive at all!" Watch another batch of Joes install it. And if I'm really evil, I'll pack it as an Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware/Firewall package, and say it needs to be installed as a driver to scan everything as it's transferred through the network, before it even reaches your hard drive. Yep, watch another batch of Joes install it.
And if that doesn't get Joe, maybe I'll target a weaker link. E.g., his wife, Jane Clueless, with some cutesy screensaver or puzzle game. Or maybe his kid, little Timmy Clueless, with some Counter-Strike wall-hack. I'll just tell Timmy that it needs that to hide itself from the HL executable, so PunkBuster doesn't catch it. (And it's even truth in advertising. It'll be a rootkit that hides itself all right, that he installs there.) Chances are one of the three, I don't even care which, will be less savvy enough to actually do it.
That is, if Joe even bothers about not running as root. Chances are at some point he'll decide it's too big of a hassle to keep su-ing back and forth, and just run as root anyway.
But do I even need root access to rape Joe's privacy? Nope. I don't give a damn about his executables, which are just what was on the distro CD anyway. Any data I'd want to steal is in Joe's own files, in
Etc.
Basically, please. Unix design and architecture mean jack squat when you have a far weaker link to attack: the untrained users. For that architecture to keep anyone safe, their own knowledge would already need to be a lot less weak a link. I.e., they'd need to be at a clue level, where, well, then they'd have no problem keeping their Windows machine clean too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, the FREE software movement started as a reaction to the mess that proprieatry UNIX market was. Why do you think GNU stands for GNU is NOT UNIX?
As for linux, if you read Linus's early e-mails from 1991, you won't find any mention of Windows in it. Couple times he mentions DOS. It doesn't surprise me, because at that time, Windows was just beginning to be popular, around version 3.1. I think that both increasing popularity or Windows as well as emmergence of Linux can be attributed to Intel's 80386 chip.
I think for a long time Linux evolved pretty much independently od Windows. It's only lately that we see a lot of work being done on "desktop environments" that are inspired by/competing with Windows in some way. There is a lot of newer applications (like office suites) that are definitely influeneced by Microsoft. Interestingly, I almost never use any of them. I only use OpenOffice or Abiword to open word documents that other people send me, and gnumeric to keep track of grades (and I am actually thinking about going back to slsc, which I used before).
AccountKiller
How to win a war? Make sure double clicking on the icon works at any cost.
"We got in my little Toyota pickup that I had at the time, we drove it to Egghead, and we literally bought one of every multimedia application in the store," Cole says. "Picture a small-size Toyota pickup and the back of it is heaped with boxes of applications, games, all kinds of crazy multimedia stuff. We brought them all back, literally backed the truck up to the building, and we handed them out to all the employees and said, 'We've got to get these things tested.'"
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Well, the same applies to OS's. If you factor in the whole mile-long list of reasons, and not just take one aspect out of context, for a lot of people Windows actually is the best choice
...
I beg to differ. To simplify to the max, reasons for Windows being used has NOTHING to do with the reasons for people that go to McDonald's.
People don't go to Mc Donald's because they know someone in the vicinity that will help them to eat for free, while that's the case with OSes.
Mc Donald's imply a sense of scarcity, nothing like that with software.
Windows right now is not popular because people love it or because it is simple. Well, to say that, I only have to look at the TONS of Windows magazine explaining lots of trivial things that should have been simple in Windows, and yet people buy these again and again. I only have to remember that AS SOON AS I stopped providing support (and other illegal things) for Windows to my vicinity, they all stopped using Windows or computers altogether.
The only thing to be proud of for MS is their monopoly. You will always read how simple and loved Windows is on forums like Slashdot, while other forums for normal users are full of people angry, with things that do not work, and who put up with it, or give up. And these are the people that can't afford to pay for phone support or don't have a geek that will waste hours to help them
Right now, Windows is the best choice when you are ready to give up lots of money, and have a geek to help you. For the family and friends I manage, Windows is not the best choice. I'm still in the minority, but I sure hope this situation will improve.
familiarity (I already know what a cheeseburger and a Cola taste like. Maybe I don't have the time or inclination right now to figure out wth 'escargot provencal avec champignons' or 'canard a l'orange' even mean, or which of them I might even like, and if I want a Chateauneuf Sauvignon or a Valadilene Pinot Gris with either.)
/., with windows you always know how to get into Office, I tend to put me in the shoes of some friends doesnt know a lot about computers and think that when they start using their computers, they will feel the same expirience as when I go to a restaurant in UK, going to Subway [or McDonalds] may not be the best option in food quality (it in fact may be the worst) but it is always the same behaviour in every place (as in point 2) people are already familiar with windows, and if they go to a internet coffee and they see a Linux machine they will not use it (I remember installing Mandrake 9.0 in a computer on a friend's internet coffee, just as an experiment. No one of the clients [hight school boys] wanted to use it).
I agree with you on this, and I can put myself as a live example[although I use Subway instead of McDonalds]. See I am from Mexico and I live now in the UK. After arriving here, the first thing one does is look for places to eat. When I was in Mexico I always wondered why Gringos (no deprecative here okey?) always wanted to eat McDonalds when they went to Cancun or Puerto Vallarta, when they where a lot of better restaurants (some of them with seafood).
After I arrived to UK and I started to look for a place to eat the places I went were of course Burger King and Subway, why? because:
1. I was already familiar with the way they "work", I just have to say that I want a package number 1, or a "king with cheese" and soda, so I am familiar with that, but not only that, I am also familiar with the place and the "mood" of that place.
2. It is really true (and a friend in Mexico that worked for the tourism told me once) that a McDonald hamburger will be the same quality in Mexico and in UK, you bet it, it is exactly the same (basically, here it is more expensive). And the same for Subway.
So, how does this translates to Miscorsoft and Windows? well, as somebody stated once on
So, a lot of people could rant that Windows is broken, that it does not works or that linux is better and has better tools or whatever, but the main reason of why it is not mainstream in the desktop is because of the more than 100 different linux distributions.
So in my opinion I think Mr. Gates and company did a great thing, they give computers to computer illiterates, maybe some elitist geeks do not like it, and they might say that people needs to understand how computer works in order to use it, but for me that sounds as stupid as some people telling me that I must learn to drive a standard transmission vehicle. I dont know to drive standard, I do not have a car now but I know that when need to buy a car, it will be automatic. Because I just want it to take me from one place to another, I do not give a dime if the car is not the best one in fuel comsuption or in speed, or if the sparkplulgs are better rounded than squared (whatever ok? as you can see I do not know anything about cars). I only want to turn on the car and (if possible) tell it to take me to the supermarket or my house or whatever.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Linux is a clone, so its effective age is more similar to that which it was cloned from, rather than its chronological age.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
To be free or not to be free: that is the question.